A walk from London to John O'Groat's

A WALK
FROM

LONDON

TO

JOHN
O' GROAT'S

If reft crick

*.

n

WALK FROM LONDON

TO

JOHN O'GROAT'S,

NOTES BY THE WAY.

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAITS.

ELIHU BUR

TTT:

SEEN BY

PRESERVATION

SERVICES,

DATE.

LONDON :

SAMPSON LOW, SON & MARSTON,

14, LUDGATE HILL,

18G4.
[The Right of Translation is Reserved."]

Robinson and Wnitt, Printers, 6a, Dowgate Hill, Londou.

PREFACE.

In presenting this volume to the public, I feel that a
few words of explanation are due to the readers that it
may obtain, in addition to those oifered to them in the
first chapter. When I first visited England, in 1846, it
was my intention to make a pedestrian tour from one
end of the island to the other, in order to become more
thoroughly acquainted with the country and people
than I could by any other mode of travelling. A few
weeks after my arrival, I set out on such a walk, and
had made about one hundred miles on foot, when I was
constrained to suspend the tour, in order to take part in
movements which soon absorbed all my time and strength.
For the ensuing ten years I was nearly the whole time
in Great Britain, travelling from one end of the king-
dom to the other, to promote the movements referred to J

IV. PREFACE.

still desiring to accomplish the walk originally proposed.
On returning to England at the beginning of 1863,
after a continuous residence of seven years in America,
I found myself, for the first time, in the condition to
carry out my intention of 1846. Several new motives
had been added in the interval to those that had at
first operated upon my mind. I had dabbled a little in
farming in my native village, New Britain, Connecti-
cut, and had labored to excite additional interest in
agriculture among my neighbors. We had formed an
Agricultural Club, and met weekly for several winters
to compare notes, exchange opinions and discuss matters
connected with the occupation. They had honored me
with the post of Corresponding Secretary from the
beginning. "We held a meeting the evening before I
left for England, when they not only refused to accept
my resignation as Secretary, but made me promise to
write them letters about fanning in the Mother Country,
and on other matters of interest that I might meet with
on my travels there. My first idea was to do this
literally ; to make a walk through the best agricultural
sections of England, and write home a series of coin-

PREFACE.

V.

munications to be inserted in our little village paper.
But, on second thought, on considering the size of the
sheet, I found it would require four or five years to print
in it all I was likely to write, at the rate of two columns
a week. So I concluded that the easiest and quickest
way would be to make a book of my Notes by the Way,
and to send back to my old friends and neighbors in
that form all the observations and incidents I might
make and meet on my walk. The next thought that
suggested itself was this, that a good many persons in
Great Britain might feel some interest in seeing what
an American who had resided so long in this country
might have to say of its sceneries, industries, social life,
&c. Still, in writing out these Notes, although two dis-
tinct circles of readers the English and American
have been present to my mind, I felt constrained to face
and address the latter, just as if speaking to them alone.
I have, moreover, adopted the free and easy style
of epistolary composition, endeavoring to make each
chapter as much like one of the letters I promised my
friends and neighbors at home as practicable. In
doing this, the "/" has, perhaps, talked far too much to

VI. PREFACE.

beseem those proprieties which the author of a book
should observe. Besides, expressions, figures and ortho-
graphy more American than English may be noticed,
which will indicate the circle of readers which the writer
had primarily in view. Still, he would fain believe that
these features of the volume will not seriously affect the
interest it might otherwise possess in the minds of those
disposed to give it a reading in this country. Whatever
exceptions they may take to the style and diction, I
hope they will find none to the spirit of the work.

ELIHU BURRITT.

X/ondon, April oth,
1864.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

PA8K.

Motives to the "Walk The Iron Horse and his Rider The Losses
and Gains by Speed The Railway Track and Turnpike Road :
Their Sceneries Compared ....... 1

CHAPTER II.

First Day's Observations and Enjoyment Rural Foot-paths ;
Visit to Tiptree Farm Alderman Mechi's Operations Im-
provements Introduced, Decried and Adopted Steam Power,
Under-Draining, Deep Tillage, Irrigation Practical Results 9

CHAPTER III.

English and American Birds The Lark and its Song . , .29

' CHAPTER IV.

Talk with an Old Man on the "Way Old Houses in England
Their American Relationships English Hedges and Hedge-
row Trees Their Probable Fate Change of Rural Scenery
without them 48

CHAPTER V.

A Footpath "Walk and its Incidents Harvest Aspects English
and American Skies Humbler Objects of Contemplation
The Donkey : Its Uses and Abuses 63

CHAPTER VL

Hospitalities of "Friends" Harvest Aspects : English Country
Inns ; their Appearance, Names and Distinctive Character-
istics The Landlady, Waiter, Chambermaid and Boots
Extra Fees and Extra Comforts ... ... 77

CHAPTER VII.

Light of Human Lives Photographs and Biograplis The late

Jonas "Webb, his Life, Labors and Memory . . . .97

CONTENTS. Vlll.

CHAPTER VIII.

Threshing Machine Flower Show The Hollyhock and its Sug-
gestions The Law of Co-operative Activities in Vegetable,
Animal, Mental and Moral Life . . . . . .135

CHAPTER IX.

Visit to a Three-Thousand-Acre Farm Samuel Jonas His
Agricultural Operations, their Extent, Success and General
Economy 163

CHAPTER X.

Royston and its Specialities Entertainment in a Small Village
St. Ives Visits to Adjoining Villages A Fen-Farm
Capital Invested in English and American Agriculture Com-
pared Allotments and Garden Tenantry Barley Grown on
Oats 184

CHAPTER XI.

The Miller of Houghton An Hour in Huntingdon Old Houses
Whitewashed Tapestry and Works of Art " The Old
Mermaid" and " The Green Man" Talk with Agricultural
Laborers Thoughts on their Condition, Prospects and
Possibilities 206

CHAPTER XII.

Farm Game Hallet Wheat Oundle Country Bridges Fother-
ingay Castle Queen Mary's Imprisonment and Execution
Burghley House : The Park, Avenues, Elms and Oaks
Thoughts on Trees, English and American .... 238

CHAPTER XIII.

Walk to Oakham The English and American Spring The Eng-
lish Gentry A Specimen of the Class Melton Mowbray and
its Specialities Belvoir Vale and its Beauty Thoughts on
the Blind Painter 260

CHAPTER XIV.

Nottingham and its Characteristics Newstead Abbey Mansfield
Talk in a Blacksmith's Shop Chesterfield, Chatsworth
and Haddon Hall Aristocratio Civilization, Present and
Past . 281

CONTENTS.

IX.

CHAPTER XV.

Sheffield and its Individuality The Country, Above Ground
and Under Ground Wakefield and Leeds Wharf Vale
Farnley Hall Harrowgate ; Ripley Castle ; Ripon ; Conser-
vatism of Country Towns Fountain Abbey ; Studley Park
Rievaulx Abbey Lord Faversham's Shorthorn Stock . 302

CHAPTER XVI.

Hexham The North Tyne Border-Land and its Suggestions
Hawick Teviotdale Birth-place of Leyden Melrose and
Dryburgh Abbeys Abbotsford : Sir Walter Scott ; Homage
to his Genius The Ferry and the Oar-Girl New Farm
Steddings Scenery of the Tweed Valley Edinburgh and
its Characteristics . . . . . . . . .327

CHAPTER XVII.

Loch Leven Its Island Castle Straths Perth Salmon-breed-
ing Thoughts on Fish-farming Dunkeld Blair Atholl
Ducal Tree-planter Strathspey and its Scenery The Roads
Scotch Cattle and Sheep Night in a Wayside Cottage
Arrival at Inverness ........ 357

CHAPTER XVIII.

Inverness ; Ross-shire ; Tain ; Dornoch ; Golspie Progress of
Railroads The Sutherland Eviction Sea-coast Scenery
Caithness Wick Herring Fisheries John 0' Groat's :
Walk's End 386

CHAPTER XIX.

Anthony Cruickshank The Greatest Herd of Shorthorns in the

World Return to London and Termination of my Tour . 414

PHOTOGRAPHS.

PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR Frontispiece.

PORTRAIT OF MR. ALDERMAN MECHI 9

PORTRAIT OF THE LATE JONAS WEBB 104

PORTRAIT OF SAMUEL JONAS 163

PORTRAIT OF ANTHONY CRUICKSHANK . .414

A Walk
From London to John 'Groat 's.

CHAPTER I.

MOTIVES TO THE WALK. THE IRON HORSE AND HIS RIDER THE LOSSES

AND GAINS BY SPEED THE RAILWAY TRACK AND TURNPIKE ROAD :

THEIR SCENERIES COMPARED.

ONE of my motives for making this tour was to
look at the country towns and villages on the
way in the face and eyes ; to enter them by the front
door, and to see them as they were made to be seen
first, as far as man's mind and hand intended and
wrought. Eailway travelling, as yet, takes everything
at a disadvantage ; it does not front on nature, or art,
or the common conditions and industries of men in
town or country. If it does not actually of itself turn,
it presents everything the wrong side outward. In
cities, it reveals the ragged and smutty companionship
of tumble-down outhouses, and mysteries of cellar and
bacXkitchen life which were never intended for other
eyes than those that grope in them by day and night.

2 A Walk from

How unnatural, and, more, almost profane and inhuman,
is the fiery locomotion of the Iron Horse through these
densely-peopled towns ! now the screech, the roar, and
the darkness of cavernous passages under paved streets,
church vaults, and an acre or two of three story brick
houses, with the feeling of a world of breathing, bust-
ling humanity incumbent upon you ; now the dash
and flash out into the light, and the higgledy-piggledy
glimpses of the next five minutes. In a moment, you
are above thickly-thronged streets, and the houses on
either side, looking down into the black throats of
smoky chimneys ; into the garret lairs of poverty, sick-
ness, and sin ; down lower upon squads of children
trying to play in back-yards eight feet square. It is
all wrong, except in the single quality of speed. You
enter the town as you would a farmer's house, if you
first passed through the pig-stye into the kitchen.
Every respectable house in the city turns its back upon
you ; and often a very brick and dirty back, too,
though it may show an elegant front of Bath or Port-
land stone to the street it faces. All the respectable
streets run over or under you, with an audible shudder
of disgust or dread. None but a shabby lane of low
shops for the sale of junk, beer, onions, shrimps, and
cabbages, will run a third of a mile by your side for
the sake of 3 r our company. The wickedest boys in the

London to John O Groat's. 3

town hoot at you, with most ignominious and satirical
antics, as you pass ; and if they do not shie stones in
upon you, or dead cats, it is more from fear of the
beadle or the constable than out of respect for your
business or pleasure.

Indeed, every town and village, great or small, which
you pass through or near on the railway, looks as if
you came fifty years before you were expected. It
says, in all the legible expressions of its countenance,
" Lack-a-day ! if here isn't that creature come already,
and looking in at my back door before I had time to
turn around, or put anything in shape ! " The Iron
Horse himself gets no sympathy nor humane admiration.
He stands grim and wrathy, when reined up for two
minutes and forty-five seconds at a station. No ven-
turesome boys pat him on the flanks, or look kindly
into his eyes, or say a pleasant word to him, or even
wonder if he is tired, or thirsty, or hungry. None of
the ostlers of the greasy stables, in which the locomo-
tives are housed, ever call him Dobbin, or Old Jack, or
Jenny, or say, " "Well done, old fellow ! " when they
unhitch him from the train at midnight, after a journey
of a hundred leagues. His driver is a real man of flesh
and blood ; with wife and children whom he loves. He
goes on Sunday to church, and, maybe, sings the psalms
of David, and listens devoutly to the sermon, and says
B 2

4 A Walk from

prayers at home, and the few who know him speak well
of him, as a good and proper man in his way. But,
spurred and mounted upon the saddle of the great iron
hexiped, nearly all the passengers regard him as a part
of the beast. No one speaks to him, or thinks of him
on the journey. He may pull up at fifty stations, and
not a soul among the Firsts, Seconds, or even Thirds, will
offer him a glass of beer, or pipe-ful of tobacco, or give
him a sixpence at the end of the ride for extra speed or
care. His face is grimy, and greasy, and black. All
his motions are ambiguous and awkward to the casual
observer. He has none of the sedate and conscious
dignity of his predecessor on the old stage-coach box.
He handles no whip, like him, with easy grace. In-
deed, in putting up his great beast to its best speed, he
" hides his whip in the manger," according to a proverb
older than steam power. He wears no gloves in the
coldest weather ; not always a coat, and never a decent
one, at his work. He blows no cheery music out of a
brass bugle as he approaches a town, but pricks the
loins of the fiery beast, and makes him scream with a
sound between a human whistle and an alligator's croak.
He never pulls up abreast of the station-house door, in
the fashion of the old coach driver, to show off himself
and his leaders, but runs on several rods ahead of pas-
sengers and spectators, as if to be clear of them and their

London to John O Groat's. 5

comments, good or bad. At the end of the journey, be
it at midnight or daybreak, not a man nor a woman he
has driven safely at the rate of forty miles an hour
thinks or cares what becomes of him, or separates him
in thought from the great iron monster he mounts.
Not the smock-frocked man, 'getting out of the forward-
most Third, with his stick and bundle, thinks of him, or
stops a moment to see him back out and turn into the
stable.

With all the practical advantages of this machine
propulsion at bird speed over space, it confounds and
swallows up the poetical aspects and picturesque scene-
ries that were the charm of old-fashioned travelling in
the country. The most beautiful landscapes rotate
around a locomotive axis confusedly. Green pastures
and yellow wheat fields are in a whirl. Tall and
venerable trees get into the wake of the same motion,
and the large, pied cows ruminating in their shade,
seem to lie on the revolving arc of an indefinite circle.
The views dissolve before their best aspect is caught by
the eye. The flowers, like Eastern beauties, can only
be seen " half hidden and half revealed," in the general
unsteadiness. As for bees, you cannot hear or see them
at all ; and the songs of the happiest birds are drowned
altogether by the clatter of a hundred wheels on the
metal track. If there are any poor, flat, or fen lands,

6 A Walk from

your way is sure to lie through them. In a picturesque
and undulating country, studded with parks and man-
sions of wealth and taste, you are plunging through a
long, dark tunnel, or walled into a deep cut, before
your eye can catch the view that dashes by your car-
riage window. If you have a utilitarian proclivity and
purpose, and would like to see the great agricultural
industries of the country, they present themselves to
you in as confused aspects as the sceneries of the passing
landscape. The face of every farm is turned from you.
The farmer's house fronts on the turnpike road, and the
best views of his homestead, of his industry, prosperity,
and happiness, look that way. Tou only get a furtive
glance, a kind of clandestine and diagonal peep at him
and his doings ; and having thus travelled a hundred
miles through a fertile country, you can form no ap-
proximate or satisfactory idea of its character and pro-
ductions.

But no facts nor arguments are needed to convince
an intelligent traveller, that the railway affords no point
of view for seeing town or country to any satisfactory
perception of its character. Indeed, neither coach of
the olden, nor cab of the modern vogue, nor saddle, will
enable one to "do" either town or country with thorough
insight and enjoyment. It takes him too long to pull
up to catch the features of a sudden view. He can do

London to John O Groat's. 7

nothing with those generous and delightful institutions
of Old England, the footpaths, that thread pasture,
park, and field, seemingly permeating her whole green
world with dusky veins for the circulation of human
life. To lose all the picturesque lanes and landscapes
which these field-paths cross and command, is to lose
the great distinctive charm of the country. Then,
neither from the coach-box nor the saddle can he make
much conversation on the way. He loses the chance of
a thousand little talks and pleasant incidents. He can-
not say " Grood morning " to the farmer at the stile, nor
a word of greeting to the reapers over the hedge, nor
see where they live, and the kind of children that play
by their cottage doors ; nor the little antique churches,
bearded to their eye-brows with ivy, covering the
wrinkles of half a dozen centuries, nor the low and
quiet villages clustering around, each like a family of
bushy-headed children surrounding their venerable
mother.

In addition to these considerations, there was another
that moved me to this walk. Although I had been up
and down the country as often and as extensively as
any American, perhaps, and admired its general scenery,
I had never looked at it with an agricultural eye or
interest. But, having dabbled a little in farming in
the interval between my last two visits to England, and

8 A Walk from

being touched with some of the enthusiasm that modern
novices carry into the occupation, I was determined to
look at the agriculture of Great Britain more leisurely
and attentively, and from a better stand-point than I
had ever done before. The thought had also occurred
to me, that a walk through the best agricultural counties
of England and Scotland would afford opportunity for
observation which might be made of some interest to
my friends and neighbour farmers in America as well as
to myself. Therefore, I beg the English reader to re-
member that I am addressing to them the notes that I
may make by the way, hoping that its incidents and
the thoughts il suggests will not be devoid of interest
because they are principally intended for the American
ear.

London to John O' Groat's.

CHAPTER II.

FIBST DAY'S OBSERVATIONS AND ENJOYMENT RURAL FOOT-PATHS J VISIT
TO TIPTREE FARM ALDERMAN MECHl's OPERATIONS IMPROVE-
MENTS INTRODUCED, DECRIED, AND ADOPTED STEAM POWEB,

UNDER-DRAINING, DEEP TILLAGE, IRRIGATION PRACTICAL RESULTS.

ON Wednesday, July 15, 1863, I left London, with
the hope that I might be able to accomplish the
northern half of my proposed " Walk from Land's End
to John O'Groat's." I had been practically prostrated
by a serious indisposition for nearly two months, and
was just able to walk one or two miles at a time about
the city. Believing that country air and exercise would
soon enable me to be longer on my feet, I concluded to
set out as I was, without waiting for additional strength,
so slow and difficult to attain in the smoky atmosphere
and hot streets of London.

Few reading farmers in America there are who are
not familiar with the name and fame of Alderman
Mechi, as an agriculturist of that new and scientific
school that is making such a revolution in the great
primeval industry of mankind. His experiments on
his Tiptree Farm have attained a world- wide publicity,
and have given that homestead an interest that, per-

io A Walk from

haps, never attached to the same number of acres in
any country or age. Thinking that this famous esta-
blishment would be a good starting point for my
pedestrian tour, I concluded to proceed thither first
by railway, and thence to walk northward, by easy
stages, through the fertile and rural county of Essex.
Taking an afternoon train, I reached Kelvedon about
5 p.m., the station for Tiptree, and a good specimen
of an English village, at two hour's ride from London.
Calling at the residence of a Friend, or Quaker, to inquire
the way to the Alderman's farm, he invited me to take
tea with him, and be his guest for the night, a hospi-
tality which I very gladly accepted, as it was a longer
walk to Tiptree than I had anticipated. After tea, my
host, who was a farmer as well as miller, took me over
his fields, and showed me his live stock, his crops of
wheat, barley, oats, beans, and roots, which were all
large and luxuriant, and looked like a tableau vivant of
plenty within the green hedges that enclosed and
adorned them.

The next morning, after breakfast, my kind host set
me on the way to Tiptree by a footpath through alter-
nating fields of wheat, barley, oats, beans, and turnips,
into which an English farm is generally divided. These
footpaths are among the vested interests of the walking
public throughout the United Kingdom. Most of them

London to John O 1 Groat's. n

are centuries old. The footsteps of a dozen generations
have given them the force and sanctity of a popular
right. A farmer might as well undertake to barricade
the turnpike road as to close one of these old paths
across his best fields. So far from obstructing them, he
finds it good policy to straighten and round them up,
and supply them with convenient gates or stiles, so that
no one shall have an excuse for trampling on his crops,
or for diverging into the open field for a shorter cut to
the main road. Blessings on the men who invented
them ! It was done when land was cheap, and public
roads were few; before four wheels were first geared
together for business or pleasure. They were the doing
of another age ; this would not have produced them.
They run through all the prose, poetry, and romance
of the rural life of England, permeating the history of
green hedges, thatched cottages, morning songs of the
lark, moonlight walks, meetings at the stile, harvest
homes of long ago, and many a romantic narrative of
human experience widely read in both hemispheres.
They will run on for ever, carrying with them the same
associations. They are the inheritance of landless mil-
lions, who have trodden them in ages past at dawn,
noon, and night, to and from their labor ; and in ages
to come the mowers and reapers shall tread them to the
morning music of the lark, and through Spring, Sum-

12 A Walk from

mer, Autumn, and Winter, they shall show the fresh
checker- work of the ploughman's hob-nailed shoe. The
surreptitious innovations of utilitarian science shall
not poach upon these sacred preserves of the people,
whatever revolutions they may produce in the machinery
and speed of turnpike locomotion. These pleasant and
peaceful paths through park, and pasture, meandering
through the beautiful and sweet-breathing artistry of
English agriculture, are guaranteed to future genera-
tions by an authority which no legislation can annul.

A walk of a few miles brought me in sight of Tiptree
Hall ; and its first aspect relieved my mind of an im-
pression which, in common with thousands better in-
formed, I had entertained in reference to the establish-
ment. An idea has generally prevailed among English
farmers, and agriculturists of other countries who have
heard of Alderman Mechi's experiments, that they were
impracticable and almost valueless, because they would
not pay ; that the balance-sheet of his operations did and
must ever show such ruinous discrepancy between income
and expenditure as must deter any man, of less capital
and reckless enthusiasm, from following his lead into
such unconsidered ventures. In short, he has been
widely regarded at home and abroad as a bold and
dashing novice in agricultural experience, ready to lavish
upon his own hasty inventions a fortune acquired in his

London to John O Groat's. 13

London warehouse ; and all this to make himself famous
as a great light in the agricultural world, which light,
after all, was a mere will-o'-the-wisp sort of affair, lead-
ing its dupes into the veriest bog of bankruptcy. In
common with all those bold, self-reliant spirits that have
ventured to break away from the antecedents of public
opinion and custom, he has been the subject of many
ungenerous inuendoes and criticisms. All kinds of am-
bitions and motives have been ascribed to him. Many
a burly, red-faced farmer, who boasts of an unbroken
agricultural lineage reaching back into the reign of
Good Queen Bess, will tell you over his beer that the
Alderman's doings are all gammon; that they are all
to advertise his cutlery business in Leadenhall Street,
Barnum fashion; to inveigle down to Tiptree Hall
noblemen, foreign ambassadors, and great people of
different countries, and bribe " an honorable mention "
out of them with champagne treats and oyster suppers.
Indeed, my Quaker host largely participated in this
opinion, and took no pains to conceal it when speaking
of his enterprising neighbor.

From what I had read and heard of the Tiptree Hall
estate, I expected to see a grand, old baronial mansion,
surrounded with elegant and costly buildings for housing
horses, cattle, sheep, and other live stock, all erected on
a scale which no bond fide farmer could adopt or approxi-

14 A Walk from

mately imitate. In a word, I fancied his barns and
stables would even surpass in this respect the establish-
ments of some of those wealthy New York or Boston
merchants, who think they are stimulating country
farmers to healthy emulation by lavishing from thirty
to forty thousand dollars on a barn and its appurtenant
outhouses. With these preconceived ideas, it was an
unexpected satisfaction to see quite a simple-looking,
unassuming establishment, which any well-to-do farmer
might make and own. The house is rather a large and
solid-looking building, erected by Mr. Mechi himself,
but not at all ostentatious of wealth or architectural
taste. The barns and " steddings," or what we call
cow-houses in America, are of a very ordinary cast, or
such as any country-bred farmer would call economical
and simple. The homestead occupies no picturesque
site, and commands no interesting scenery. The farm
consists of about 170 acres, which, in England, is re-
garded as a rather small holding. The land is naturally
sterile and hard of cultivation, most of it apparently
being heavily mixed with ferruginous matter. When
plowed deeply, the clods turned up look frequently like
compact masses of iron ore. Every experienced farmer
knows the natural poverty of such a soil, and the hard
labor to man and beast it costs to till it.

To my great regret, Mr. Mechi was not at home,

London to John O Groat's. 15

though he passes most of his time in summer at Tiptree.
But his foreman, who enters into all the experiments
and operations which have made the establishment so
famous, with almost equal interest and enthusiasm, took
me through the farm buildings, and all the fields, and
showed me the whole process and machinery employed.
Any English or American agriculturist who has read of
Alderman Mechi's operations, would be inclined to ask,
on looking, for the first time, at his buildings and the
fields surrounding them, what is the great distinguish-
ing speciality of his enterprise. His land is poor ; his
housings are simple ; there is no outside show of un-
common taste or genius. Every acre is tile-drained, to
be sure. But that is nothing new nor uncommon.
Drainage is the order of the day. Any tenant farmer
in England can have his land drained by the Grovern-
ment by paying six per cent, annually on the cost of
the job. His expenditure for artificial manures does
not exceed that of hundreds of good farmers. He
carries out the deep tillage system most liberally. So
do other scientific agriculturists in Europe and America.
Of course, a few hours' observation would not suffice for
a full and correct conclusion on this point, but it gave
me the impression that the great operation which has
won for the Tiptree Farm its special distinction, is its
irrigation with liquid manure. In this respect it stands

1 6 A Walk from

unrivalled, and, perhaps, unimitated. And this, pro-
bably, is the head and front of his offending to those
who criticise his economy and decry his experiments.

This irrigation is performed through the medium of
a small steam engine and sixteen hydrants, so posted
and supplied with hose as to reach every square foot of
the 170 acres. The water used for this purpose is
mostly, if not entirely, supplied from the draining
pipes, even in the dryest season. The manure thus
liquified is made by a comparatively small number of
animals. Calves to the value of 50 are bought, and
fat stock to that of 500 are sold annually. They are
all stabled throughout the year, except in harvest time,
when they are turned out for a few weeks to rowen
feed. The calves are housed until a year old in a large
stedding by themselves. They are then transferred to
another building, and put upon " the boards ;" that is,
in a long stable or cow-house, with a flooring of slats,
through which the manure drops into a cellar below,
made water-tight. Here the busiest little engine in the
world is brought to bear upon it, with all its faculties of
suction and propulsion. Through one pipe it forces
fresh water in upon this mass of manure, which, when
liquified, runs down into a subterranean cistern or reser-
voir capable of holding over 100,000 gallons. From
this it is propelled into any field to be irrigated. To

London to John O 1 Groat's. 17

prevent any sediment in the great reservoir, or to make
an even mixture of the liquified manure, a hose is
attached to the engine, and the other end dropped into
the mass. Through this a constant volume of air is
propelled with such force as to set the whole boiling and
foaming like a little cataract. One man at the engine
and two at the hose in the distant field perform the
whole operation. The chapped and " baky " surface of
the farm is thus softened and enriched at will, and ren-
dered productive.

Now, this operation seems to constitute the present
distinctive speciality of Alderman Mechi's Tiptree Farm.
Will it pay? ask a thousand voices. In how many
years will he get his money back ? Give us the
balance sheet of the experiment. A New Englander,
favorably impressed with the process, would be likely
to answer these questions by another, and ask, will
drainage pay ? Not in one year, assuredly, nor in five ;
not in ten, perhaps. The British Government assumes
that all the expenditure upon under-drainage will be
paid back in fifteen or twenty years at the farthest. It
lends money to the landowner on this basis ; and the
landowner stipulates with his tenant that he shall reim-
burse him by annual instalments of six or seven per
cent, until the whole cost of the operation is liquidated.
Thus the tenant-farmer is willing to pay six, sometimes

1 8 A Walk from

seven per cent, annually, for twenty years, for the in-
creased capacity of production which drainage gives to
the farm he cultivates. At the end of that period the
Government is paid by the landlord, and the landlord
by the tenant, and the tenant by his augmented crops
for the whole original outlay upon the land. For aught
either of the three parties to the operation knows to the
contrary, it must all be done over again at the end of
twenty years. The system is too young yet, even in
England, for any one to say how long a course of tubing
will last, or how often it must be relaid.

One point, therefore, has been gained. No intelligent
English farmer, who has tried the system, now asks if
under-drainage will pay ; nor does he expect that it will
pay back the whole expenditure in less than twelve or
fifteen years. Here is a generous faith in the operation
on the side of all the parties concerned. Then why
should not Alderman Mechi's irrigation system be put
on the same footing, in the matter of public confidence ?
It is nothing very uncommon even for a two hundred
acre farmer in England to have a small stationary or
locomotive steam-engine, and to find plenty of work for
it, too, in threshing his grain, grinding his fodder, pulp-
ing his roots, cutting his hay and straw, and for other
purposes. Mr. Mechi would doubtless have one for
these objects alone. So its cost must not be charged

London to John O Groat's. 19

to the account of irrigation. A single course of iron
tubing, a third of a mile long, reaching to the centre of
his farthest field, cannot cost more, with all the hose
employed, than the drainage of that field, while it would
be fair to assume that the iron pipes will last twice as
long as those of burnt clay. They might fairly be
expected to hold good for forty years. If, then, for
this period, or less, the process yields ten per cent, of
increased production annually, over and above the effect
of all other means employed, it is quite evident that it
will pay as well as drainage.

But does it augment the yearly production of the
farm by this amount ? To say that it is the only pro-
cess by which the baky and chappy soil of Tiptree can
be thoroughly fertilised, would not suffice to prove its
necessity or value to other soils of different composition.
One fact, however, may be sufficient to determine its
virtue. The fields of clover and Italian rye-grass, &c.,
are mown three and even four times in one season, and
afterwards fed with sheep. Certainly, no other system
could produce all this cropping. The distinctive dif-
ference it makes in other crops cannot, perhaps, be made
so palpable. The wheat looked strong and heavy, with
a fair promise of forty-five bushels to an acre. The
oats, beans, and roots showed equally well.

The irrigation and deep tillage systems were going
c2

2O A Walk from

on simultaneously in the same field, affording me a
good opportunity of seeing the operation of both. Two
men were plying the hose upon a portion of the field
which had already been mowed three times. Two
teams were at work turning up the other, which had
already teen cropped once or twice. One of two horses
went first, and, with a common English plough, turned
an ordinary furrow. Then the other followed, of twice
the force of the first, in the same furrow, with a subsoil
plough held to the work beam-deep. The iron-stones
and ferruginous clods turned up by this " deep tillage "
would make a prairie farmer of Illinois wonder, if not
shudder, at the plucky and ingenious industry which
competes with his easy toil and cheap land in providing
bread for the landless millions of Great Britain.

The only exceptional feature or arrangement, besides
the irrigating machinery and process, that I noticed,
was an iron hurdling for folding sheep. This, at first
sight, might look to a practical farmer a little extrava-
gant, indicating a city origin, or the notion of an ama-
teur agriculturist, more ambitious of the new than of
the necessary. Each length of this iron fencing is
apparently about a rod, and cost 1, or nearly five
dollars. It is fitted to low wheels, or rollers, on an
axle two or three feet in length, so that it can be moved
easily and quickly in any direction. It would cost over

London to John O* Groat's. 21

fifty pounds, or two hundred and fifty dollars, to enclose
an acre entirely with this kind of hurdling. Still, Mr.
Mechi would doubtless be able to show that this large
expenditure is a good investment, and pays well in the
long run. The folding of sheep for twenty-four or
forty-eight hours on small patches of clover, trefoil,
or turnips, is a very important department of English
farming, both for fattening them for the market and
for putting the land in better heart than any other
fertilising process could effect. Now, a man with this
iron fencing on wheels must be able to make in two
hours an enclosure that would cost him a day or more
of busy labor with the old wooden hurdles.

On the whole, a practical farmer, who has no other
source of income than the single occupation of agricul-
ture, would be likely to ask, what is the realised value
of Alderman Mechi's operations to the common grain
and stock-growers of the world? They have excited
more attention or curiosity than any other experiments
of the present day ; but what is the real resume of their
results ? "What new principles has he laid down ; what
new economy has he reduced to a science that may be
profitably utilised by the million who get their living
by farming ? What has he actually done that anybody
else has adopted or imitated to any tangible advan-
tage ? These are important questions ; and this is the

22 A Walk from

way lie undertakes to answer them, beginning with the
last.

About twenty years ago, he inaugurated the system
of under-draining the heavy tile-clay lands in Essex.
Up to his experiment, the process was deemed imprac-
ticable and worthless by the most intelligent farmers of
the county. It was more confidently decried than his
present irrigation system. The water would never find
its way down into the drain-pipes through such clay.
It stood to reason that it would do no such thing. Did
not the water stand in the track of the horse's hoof in
such clay until evaporated by the sun? It might as
well leak through an earthenware basin. It was all
nonsense to bury a man's money in that style. He
never would see a shilling of it back again. In the
face of these opinions, Mr. Mechi went on, training
his pipes through field after field, deep below the sur-
face. And the water percolated through the clay
into them, until all these long veins formed a con-
tinuous and rushing stream into the main artery that
now furnishes an ample supply for his stabled cattle,
for his steam engine, and for all the barn-yard wants.
His tile-draining of clay-lands was a capital success;
and those who derided and opposed it have now adopted
it to their great advantage, and to the vast augmenta-
tion of the value and production of the county. Here,

London to John O 'Groat's. 23

then, is one thing in which he has led, and others have
followed to a great practical result.

His next leading was in the way of agricultural
machinery. He first introduced a steam engine for
farming purposes in a district containing a million of
acres. That, too, at the outset, was a fantastic vagary
in the opinion of thousands of solid and respectahle
farmers. They insisted the Iron Horse would be as
dangerous in the barn-yard or rick-yard as the very
dragon in Scripture ; that he would set everything on
fire ; kill the men who had care of him ; burst and blow
up himself and all the buildings into the air ; that all
the horses, cows, and sheep would be frightened to
death at the very sight of the monster, and never could
be brought to lie down in peace and safety by his side,
even when his blood was cold, and when he was fast
asleep. To think of it ! to have a tall chimney tower-
ing up over a barn-gable or barn-yard, and puffing out
black coal smoke, cotton-factory-wise ! Pretty talk !
pretty terms to train an honest and virtuous farmer to
mouth! Wouldn't it be edifying to hear him string
the yarn of these new words ! to hear him tell of his
engineer and ploughman ; of his pokers and pitchforks ;
of six-horse potcer, valves, revolutions, stopcocks, twenty
pounds of steam, &c. ; mixing up all this ridiculous stuff
with yearling calves, turnips, horse-carts, oilcake, wool,

24 A Walk from

bullocks, beans, and sheep, and other vital things and
interests, which forty centuries have looked upon with
reverence ! To plough, thresh, cut turnips, grind corn,
and pump water for cattle by steam ! What next ?

Why, next, the farmers of the region round about

" First pitied, then embraced "

this new and powerful auxiliary to agricultural industry,
after having watched its working and its worth. And
now, thanks to such bold and spirited novices as Mr.
Mechi men who had the pluck to work steadily on under
the pattering rain of derisive epithets there are already
nearly as many steam engines working at farm labor
between Land's End and John 0' Groat's as there are
employed in the manufacture of cotton in Great Britain.

His irrigation system will doubtless be followed in
the same order and interval by those who have pooh-
poohed it with the same derision and incredulty as the
other innovations they have already adopted. The
utilising of the sewage of large towns, especially of
London, has now become a prominent idea and move-
ment. Mr. Mechi's machinery and process are admir-
ably adapted to the work of distributing a river of this
fertilising material over any farm to which it may be
conducted. Thus, there is good reason to believe that
the very process he originated for softening and enrich-
ing the hard and sterile acres of his small farm in Essex

London to John O* Groat's. 25

will be adopted for saturating millions of acres in Great
Britain with the millions of tons of manurial matter
that have hitherto blackened and poisoned the rivers of
the country on their wasteful way to the sea. This will
be only an additional work for the farm engines now in
operation, accomplished with but little increased ex-
pense. A single fact may illustrate the irrigating
capacity of Mr. Mechi's machinery. It throws upon a
field a quantity of the fertilising fluid equal to one inch
of rainfall at a time, or 100 tons per imperial acre.
And., as a proof of how deep it penetrates, the drains
run freely with it, thus showing conclusively that the
subsoil has been well saturated, a point of vital im-
portance to the crop.

Deep tillage is another speciality that distinguished
the Tiptree Farm regime at the beginning, in which
Mr. Mechi led, and in which he has been followed by
the farmers of the county, although few have come up
abreast of him as yet in the system.

Here, then, are four specific departments of improve-
ment in agricultural industry which the Alderman has
introduced. Every one of them has been ridiculed as
an impracticable and useless innovation in its turn.
Three of them have already been adopted, and virtually
incorporated with agricultural science and economy;
and the fourth, or irrigation by steam power, bids fair

26 A Walk from

to find as much favor, and as many adherents in the
end, as the others have done.

He has not only originated these improvements, or
been the first to give them practical experiment, but he
has laid down certain principles which will doubtless
exercise much influence in shaping the industrial
economy of agriculture hereafter in different countries.
One of the best of these principles he puts in the form
of a mathematical proposition. Thus : As the meat is
to the manure, so is the crop to the land. Tell me, he
says, how much meat you make, and I will tell you
how much corn you make, to the acre. Meat, then, is
the starting point with him; the basis of his annual
production, to which he looks for a satisfactory decision
of his balance-sheet. To show the value he attaches to
this element, the fact will suffice that he usually keeps
65 bullocks, cows, and calves, 100 sheep, and a number
of pigs, besides his horses, making one head to every
acre of his farm. With this amount of live stock he
makes from 4 to 5 worth of meat per acre annually.
Perhaps it would be safe to say that no other 170 acres
of land in the world make more meat, manure, and
grain in the year than the Tiptree Farm. In these
results Mr. Mechi thinks his experiments and improve-
ments have proved

Quod es demonstrandum.

London to John O* Groat's. 27

Having gone over the farm pretty thoroughly, and
noticed all the leading features of the establishment, I
was requested by the foreman to enter my name in the
visitor's book kept in his neat cottage parlor. It is
a large volume, with the ruling running across both the
wide pages ; the leffc apportioned to name, town, coun-
try, and profession ; the right to remarks of the visitor.
It is truly a remarkable book of interesting autographs
and observations, which the philologist as well as agri-
culturist might pore over with lively satisfaction. It
not only contains the names and comments of many
of the most distinguished personages in Great Britain,
but those of all other countries of Europe, even of Asia
and Africa, as well as America. Foreign ambassadors,
Continental savans, men of fame in the literary, scien-
tific, and political world, have here recorded their names
and impressions in the most unique succession and
blending. Here, under one date, is a party of Italian
gentlemen, leaving their autographs and their observa-
tions in the softest syllables of their language. Then
several German connoisseurs follow, in their peculiar
script, with comments worded heavily with hard-
mouthed consonants. Then comes, perhaps, a single
Russian nobleman, who expresses his profound satis-
faction in the politest French. Next succeed three or
four Spanish Dons, with a long fence of names attached

28 A Walk from

to each, who give their views of the establishment in
the grave, sonorous words of their language. Here,
now, an American puts in his autograph, with his
sharp, curt notion of the matter, as " first-rate." Yery
likely a turbaned Mufti or Singh of the Oriental world
follows the New England farmer. Danish and Swedish
knights prolong the procession, mingling with Austra-
lian wool-growers, Members of the French Eoyal Aca-
demy, Canadian timber-merchants, Dutch Mynheers,
Brazilian coffee-planters, Belgian lace-makers, and the
representatives of all other countries and professions in
Christendom. An autograph-monger, with the mania
strong upon him, of unscrupulous curiosity, armed fur-
tively with a keen pair of scissors, would be a dangerous
person to admit to the presence of that big book without
a policeman at his elbow.

Tiptree Hall has its own literature also, in two or
three volumes, written by Mr. Mechi himself, and de-
scribing fully his agricultural experience and experi-
ments, and giving facts and arguments which every
English and American farmer might study with profit.

London to John O 1 Groat's.

CHAPTER III.

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN BIRDS.

" What thou art we know not ;
What is most like thee ?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see,
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody."

SHELLEY'S "SKYLARK."

" Do you ne'er think what wondrous beings these ?
Do you ne'er think who made them, and who taught
The dialect they speak, whose melodies
Alone are the interpreters of thought ?
Whose household words are songs in many keys,
Sweeter than instrument of man e'er caught !
Whose habitations in the tree-tops, even,
Are half-way houses on the road to heaven."

LONGFELLOW.

HAYING- spent a couple of hours very pleasantly
at Tiptree Hall, I turned my face in a northerly
direction for a walk through the best agricultural sec-
tion of Essex. While passing through a grass field
recently mown, a lark flew up from almost under my
feet. And there, partially overarched by a tuft of
clover, was her little all of earth a snug, warm nest
with two small eggs in it, about the size and colour of
those of the ground-chipping-bird of New England,
which is nearer the English lark than any other Ameri-
can bird. I bent down to look at them with an interest

30 A Walk from

an American could only feel. To him the lark is to
the bird-world's companionship and music what the
angels are to the spirit land. He has read and dreamed
of both from his childhood up. He has believed in
both poetically and pleasantly, sometimes almost posi-
tively, as real and beautiful individualities. He almost
credits the poet of his own country, who speaks of hear-
ing "the downward beat of angel wings." In his
facile faith in the substance of picturesque and happy
shadows, he sometimes tries to believe that the phoenix
may have been, in some age and country, a real, living
bird, of flesh and blood and genuine feathers, with long,
strong wings, capable of performing the strange psyco-
logical feats ascribed to it in that most edifying picture
emblazoned on the arms of Banking Companies, In-
surance Offices, and Quack Doctors. He is not sure
that dying swans have not sung a mournful hymn over
their last moments, under an affecting and human sense
of their mortality. He has believed in the English
lark to the same point of pleasing credulity. Why
should he not give its existence the same faith ? The
history of its life is as old as the English alphabet, and
older still. It sang over the dark and hideous lairs of
the bloody Druids centuries before Julius Csesar was
born, and they doubtless had a pleasant name for it,
unless true music was hateful to their ears. It sang,

London to John O' Groats. 31

without loss or change of a single note of this morning's
song, to the Roman legions as they marched, or made
roads in Britain. It sang the same voluntaries to the
Saxons, Danes, and Normans, through the long ages,
and, perhaps, tended to soften their antagonisms, and
hasten their blending into one great and mighty people.
How the name and song of this happiest of earthly
birds run through all the rhyme and romance of Eng-
lish poetry, of English rural life, ever since there was
an England ! Take away its history and its song from
her daisy-eyed meadows and shaded lanes, and hedges
breathing and blooming with sweetbriar leaves and
hawthorn flowers from her thatched cottages, veiled
with ivy from the morning tread of the reapers, and
the mower's lunch of bread and cheese under the mea-
dow elm, and you take away a living and beautiful
spirit more charming than music. You take away from
English poetry one of its pleiades, and bereave it of a
companionship more intimate than that of the nearest
neighbourhood of the stars above. How the lark's life
and song blend, in the rhyme of the poet, with "the
sheen of silver fountains leaping to the sea," with
morning sunbeams and noontide thoughts, with the
sweetest breathing flowers, and softest breezes, and
busiest bees, and greenest leaves, and happiest human
industries, loves, hopes, and aspirations !

32 A Walk from

The American has read and heard of all this from
his youth up to the day of setting his foot, for the first
time, on English ground. He has tried to believe it,
as in things seen, temporal and tangible. But in doing
this he has to contend with a sense or suspicion of un-
reality a feeling that there has been great poetical
exaggeration in the matter. A patent fact lies at the
bottom of this incredulity. The forefathers of New
England carried no wild birds with them to sing about
their cabin-homes in the New World. But they found
beautiful and happy birds on that wild continent, as
well-dressed, as graceful in form and motion, and of as
fine taste for music and other accomplishments, as if
they and their ancestors had sung before the courts of
Europe for twenty generations. These sang their sweet
songs of welcome to the Pilgrims as they landed from
the " May-Flower." These sang to them cheerily,
through the first years and the later years of their
stern trials and tribulations. These built their nests
where the blue eyes of the first white children born in
the land could peer in upon the speckled eggs with
wonder and delight. What wonder that those strong-
hearted puritan fathers and mothers, who

" Made the aisles of the dim wood ring
" With the anthems of the free,"

should love the fellowship of these native singers of the

London to John O Groat's. 33

field and forest, and give them names their hearts loved
in the old home land beyond the sea ! They did not
consult Linnaeus, nor any musty Latin genealogy of
Old "World birds, at the christening of these songsters.
There was a good family resemblance in many cases.
The blustering partridge, brooding over her young in
the thicket, was very nearly like the same bird in Eng-
land. For the mellow-throated thrush of the old land
they found a mate in the new, of the same size, color,
and general habits, though less musical. The black-
bird was nearly the same in many respects, though the
smaller American wore a pair of red epaulettes. The
swallows had their coat tails cut after the same old
English pattern, and built their nests after the same
model, and twittered under the eaves with the same
ecstacy, and played the same antics in the air. But
the two dearest home-birds of the fatherland had no
family relations nor counterparts in America ; and the
pilgrim fathers and their children could not make their
humble homes happy without the lark and the robin,
at least in name and association ; so they looked about
them for substitutes. There was a plump, full-chested
bird, in a chocolate-colored vest, with bluish dress coat,
that would mount the highest tree-top in early spring,
and play his flute by the hour for very joy to see the
snow melt and the buds swell again. There was such

34 ^ Walk from

a rollicking happiness in his loud, clear notes, and he
apparently sang them in such sympathy with human
fellowships, and hopes, and homes, and he was such a
cheery and confiding denizen of the orchard and garden
withal, that he became at once the pet bird of old and
young, and was called the robin ; and well would it be
if its English namesake possessed its sterling virtues ;
for, with all its pleasant traits and world-wide repu-
tation, the English robin is a pretentious, arrogant
busybody, characteristicaly pugilistic and troublesome
in the winged society of England. In form, dress,
deportment, disposition, and in voice and taste for
vocal music, the American robin surpasses the English
most decidedly. In this our grave forefathers did more
than justice to the home-bird they missed on Plymouth
Rock. In this generous tribute of their affection for it,
they perhaps condoned for mating the English lark so
incongruously ; but it was true their choice was very
limited. To match the prima donna carissima of Eng-
lish field and sky, it was necessary to select a meadow
bird, with some other features of resemblance. It would
never do to give the cherished name and association to
one that lived in the forest, or built its nest in the tree-
tops or house-tops, or to one that was black, yellow, or
red. Having to conciliate all these conditions, and do
the best with the material at hand, they pitched upon

London to John O Groat's.

35

a rather large, brownish bird, in a drab waistcoat,
slightly mottled, and with a loud, cracked voice, which
nobody ever liked. So it never became a favorite, even
to those who first gave it the name of lark. It was not
its only defect that it lacked an ear and voice for music.
There is always a scolding accent that marks its con-
versation with other birds in the brightest mornings of
June. He is very noisy, but never merry nor musical.
Indeed, compared with the notes of the English lark,
his are like the vehement ejaculations of a maternal
duck in distress.

Take it in all, no bird in either hemisphere equals the
English lark in heart or voice, for both unite to make
it the sweetest, happiest, the welcomest singer that was
ever winged, like the high angels of (rod's love. It is
the living ecstacy of joy when it mounts up into its
" glorious privacy of light." On the earth it is timid,
silent, and bashful, as if not at home, and not sure of
its right to be there at all. It is rather homely withal,
having nothing in feather, feature, or form, to attract
notice. It is seemingly made to be heard, not seen,
reversing the old axiom addressed to children when
getting voicy. Its mission is music, and it floods a
thousand acres of the blue sky with it several times a
day. Out of that palpitating speck of living joy there
wells forth a sea of twittering ecstacy upon the morn-
i) 2

36 A Walk from

ing and evening air. It does not ascend by gyrations,
like the eagle or birds of prey. It mounts up like a
human aspiration. It seems to spread out its wings
and to be lifted straight upwards out of sight by the
aflatus of its own happy heart. To pour out this in
undulating rivulets of rhapsody, is apparently the only
motive of its ascension. This it is that has made it so
loved of all generations. It is the singing angel of
man's nearest heaven, whose vital breath is music. Its
sweet warbling is only the metrical palpitation of its
life of joy. It goes up over the roof- trees of the rural
hamlet on the wings of its song, as if to train the human
soul to trial flights heavenward. Never did the Creator
put a voice of such volume into so small a living thing.
It is a marvel almost a miracle. In a still hour you
can hear it at nearly a mile's distance. "When its form
is lost in the hazy lace-work of the sun's rays above, it
pours down upon you all the thrilling semitones of its
song as distinctly as if it were warbling to you in your
window.

The only American bird that could star it with the
English lark, and win any admiration at a popular
concert by its side, is our favourite comic singer, the
Bobolink. I have thought often, when listening to
British birds at their morning rehearsals, what a sen-
sation would ensue if Master Bob, in his odd-fashioned

London to John O Groat's. 37

bib and tucker, should swagger into their midst, sing-
ing one of those Low-Dutch voluntaries which he loves
to pour down into the ears of our mowers in haying
time. Not only would such an apparition and overture
throw the best-trained orchestra of Old World birds into
amazement or confusion, but astonish all the human
listeners at an English concert. With what a wonder-
ment would one of these blooming, country milkmaids
look at the droll harlequin, and listen to those familiar
words of his, set to his own music :

Go to milk ! go to milk !
Oh, Miss Phillisey,
Dear Miss Phillisey,
What will "Willie say
If you don't go to milk !
No cheese, no cheese,
No butter nor cheese
If you don't go to milk.

It is a wonder that in these days of refined civiliza-
tion, when Jenny Land, Grisi, Patti, and other cele-
brated European singers, some of them from very warm
climates, are transported to America to delight our
Upper- Tendom, that there should be no persistent and
successful effort to introduce the English lark into our
out-door orchestra of singing-birds. No European voice
would be more welcome to the American million. It
would be a great gain to the nation, and be helpful to
our religious devotions, as well as to our secular satis-

38 A Walk from

factions. In several of our sabbath hymns there is
poetical reference to the lark and its song. For in-
stance, that favorite psalm of gratitude for returning
Spring opens with these lines :

" The winter is over and gone,

" The thrush whistles sweet on the spray,

" The turtle breathes forth her soft moan,

" The lark mounts on high and warbles away."

Now not one American man, woman, or child in a
thousand ever heard or saw an English lark, and how
is he, she, or it to sing the last line of the foregoing
verse with the spirit and understanding due to an
exercise of devotion ? The American lark never mounts
higher than the top of a meadow elm, on which it see-
saws, and screams, or quacks, till it is tired ; then draws
a bee-line for another tree, or a fence-post, never even
undulating on the voyage. It may be said, truly
enough, that the hymn was written in England. Still,
if sung in America from generation to generation, we
ought to have the English lark with us, for our children
to see and hear, lest they may be tempted to believe
that other and more serious similes in our sabbath
hymns are founde4 on fancy instead of fact.

Nor would it be straining the point, nor be dealing
in poetical fancies, if we should predicate upon the in-
troduction of the English lark into American society a
supplementary influence much needed to unify and

London to John O 1 Groat's. 39

nationalise the heterogeneous elements of our popula-
tion. Men, women, and children, speaking all the
languages and representing all the countries and races
of Europe, are streaming in upon us weekly in widen-
ing currents. The rapidity with which they become
assimilated to the native population is remarkable.
But there is one element from abroad that does not
Americanise itself so easily and that, curiously, is one
the most American that comes from Europe in other
words, the English. They find with us everything as
English as it can possibly be out of England their
language, their laws, their literature, their very bibles,
psalm-books, psalm-tunes, the same faith and forms of
worship, the same common histories, memories, affini-
ties, affections, and general structure of social life and
public institutions ; yet they are generally the very last
to be and feel at home in America. A Norwegian
mountaineer, in his deerskin doublet, and with a dozen
English words picked up on the voyage, will Ameri-
canise himself more in one year on an Illinois prairie,
than an intelligent, middle- class Englishman will do
in ten, in the best society of Massachusetts. Now, I
am not dallying with a facetious fantasy when I ex-
press the opinion, that the life and song of the English
lark in America, superadded to the other institutions
and influences indicated, would go a great way in

4O A Walk from

fusing this hitherto insoluble element, and blending it
harmoniously with the best vitalities of the nation.
And this consummation would well repay a special
and extraordinary effort. Perhaps this expedient would
be the most successful of all that remain untried. A
single incident will prove that it is more than a mere
theory. Here it is, in substance :

Some years ago, when the Australian gold fever was
hot in the veins of thousands, and fleets of ships were
conveying them to that far-off, uncultivated world, a
poor old woman landed with the great multitude of
rough and reckless men, who were fired to almost
frenzy by dreams of ponderous nuggets and golden
fortunes. For these they left behind them all the
enjoyments, endearments, all the softening sanctities
and surroundings of home and social life in England.
For these they left mothers, wives, sisters and daughters.
There they were, thinly tented in the rain, and the
dew, and the mist, a busy, boisterous, womanless camp
of diggers and grubbers, roughing-and-tumbling it in
the scramble for gold mites, with no quiet sabbath
breaks, nor sabbath songs, nor sabbath bells to mea-
sure off and sweeten a season of rest. Well, the poor
widow, who had her cabin within a few miles of " the
diggings," brought with her but few comforts from the
old homeland a few simple articles of furniture, the

London to John O' Groat's. 41

bible and psalm-book of her youth, and an English lark
to sing to her solitude the songs that had cheered her
on the other side of the globe. And the little thing
did it with all the fervor of its first notes in the Eng-
lish sky. In her cottage window it sang to her hour
by hour at her labor, with a voice never heard before
on that wild continent. The strange birds of the land
came circling around in their gorgeous plumage to
hear it. Even four-footed animals, of grim countenance,
paused to hear it. Then, one by one, came other lis-
teners. They came reverently, and their voices softened
into silence as they listened. Hard-visaged men, bare-
breasted and unshaven, came and stood gently as girls ;
and tears came out upon many a tanned and sun-
blistered cheek as the little bird warbled forth the
silvery treble of its song about the green hedges, the
meadow streams, the cottage homes, and all the sunny
memories of the fatherland. And they came near unto
the lone widow with pebbles of gold in their hard and
horny hands, and asked her to sell them the bird, that
it might sing to them while they were bending to the
pick and the spade. She was poor, and the gold was
heavy ; yet she could not sell the warbling joy of her
life. But she told them that they might come when-
ever they would to hear it sing. So, on sabbath days,
having no other preacher nor teacher, nor sanctuary

42 A Walk from

privilege, they came down in large companies from
their gold-pits, and listened to the devotional hymns
of the lark, and became better and happier men for its
music.

Seriously, it may be urged that the refined tastes,
arts, and genius of the present day do not develope
themselves symmetrically or simultaneously in this
matter. Here are connoisseurs and enthusiasts in
vegetable nature hunting up and down all the earth's
continents for rare trees, plants, shrubs, and flowers.
They are bringing them to England and America in
shiploads, to such extent and variety, that nearly all
the dead languages and many of the living are ran-
sacked to furnish names for them. Llamas, drome-
daries, Cashmere goats, and other strange animals, are
brought, thousands of miles by sea and land, to be
acclimatised and domesticated to these northern coun-
tries. Artificial lakes are made for the cultivation of
fish caught in antipodean streams. That is all plea-
sant and hopeful and proper. The more of that sort of
thing the better. But why not do the other thing, too ?
Yattemare made it the mission of his life to induce
people of different countries to exchange books, or un-
needed duplicates of literature. We need an Audubon
or Wilson, not to make new collections of feathered
skeletons, and new volumes on ornithology, but to

London to John O 1 Groat's. 43

effect an exchange of living birds between Europe and
America ; not for caging, not for Zoological gardens
and museums, but for singing their free songs in our
fields and forests. There is no doubt that the English
lark would thrive and sing as well in America as in
this country. And our Bobolink would be as easily
acclimatised in Europe. Who could estimate the plea-
sure which such an exchange in the bird- world would
give to millions on both sides of the Atlantic ?

There are some English birds which we could not
introduce into the feathered society of America, any
more than we could import a score of British Dukes
and Duchesses, with all their hereditary dignities and
grand surroundings, into the very heart and centre of
our democracy. For instance, the grave and aristo-
cratic rooks, if transported to our country, would turn
up their noses and caw with contempt at our institu-
tions even at our oldest buildings and most solemn
and dignified oaks. It is very doubtful if they would
be conciliated into any respect for the Capitol or The
White House at Washington. They have an intuitive
and most discriminating perception of antiquity, and
their adhesion to it is invincible. Whether they came
in with the Normans, or before, history does not say.
One thing would seem evident. They are older than
the Order of the Garter, and belonged to feudalism.

44 A Walk from

They are the living spirits of feudalism, which have
survived its human retainers by several hundred years,
and now represent the defunct institution as preten-
tiously as in King Stephen's day. They are as fond
of old Norman castles, cathedrals, and churches, as the
very ivy itself, and cling to them with as much per-
tinacity. For several hundred generations of bird-life,
they and their ancestors have colonised their sable com-
munities in the baronial park-trees of England, and
their descendants promise to abide for as many genera-
tions to come. In size, form, and color they differ but
little from the American crow, but are swifter on the
wing, with greater " gift of the gab," and less dignified
in general deportment, though more given to aristo-
cratic airs. Although they emigrated from France
long before " La Democratic Sociale " was ever heard of
in that country, they may be considered the founders of
the Socialistic theory and practice ; and to this day they
live and move in phalansteries, which succeed far better
than those attempted by the American " Fourierites "
some years ago. As in human communities, the col-
lision of mind with mind contributes fortuitous scintil-
lations of intelligence to their general enlightment, so
gregarious animals, birds and bees seem to acquire
especial quick- wittedness from similar intercourse. The
English rook, therefore, is more astute, subtle, and cun-

London to John O' Groat's. 45

ning than our American crow, and some of his feats of
legerdemain are quite vulpine.

. The jackdaw is to the rook what the Esquimaux is to
the Alogonquin Indian ; of the same form, color, and
general habits, but smaller in size. They are as fond
of ancient abbeys and churches as were ever the monks
of old. Indeed, they have many monkish habits and
predilections, and chatter over their Latin rituals in
the storied towers of old Norman cathedrals, and in
the belfries of ivy-webbed churches in as vivicacious
confusion.

There is no country in the world of the same size
that has so many birds in it as England; and there
are none so musical and merry. They all sing here
congregationalwise, just as the people do in the churches
and chapels of all religious denominations. As these
buildings were fashioned in early times after the Gothic
order of elm and oak-tree architecture, so the human
worshippers therein imitated the birds, as well as the
branches, of those trees, and learned to sing their sab-
bath hymns together, young and old, rich and poor,
in the same general uprising and blending of multi-
tudinous voices. I believe everything sings that has
wings in England. And well it might, for here it is
safe from shot, stones, snares, and other destructives.
"Young England" is not allowed to sport with fire-

46 A Walk from

arms, after the fashion of our American boys. You
hear no juvenile popping at the small birds of the
meadow, thicket, or hedgerow, in spring, summer, or
autumn. After travelling and sojourning nearly ten
years in the country, I have never seen a boy throw a
stone at a sparrow, or climb a tree for a bird's-nest.
The only birds that are not expected to die a natural
death are the pheasant, partridge, grouse, and wood-
cock; and these are to be killed according to the strictest
laws and customs, at a certain season of the year, and
then only by titled or wealthy men who hold their
vested interest in the sport among the most rigid and
sacred rights of property. Thus law, custom, public
sentiment, climate, soil, and production, all combine to
give bird-life a development in England that it attains
in no other country. In no other land is it so multi-
tudinous and musical ; in none is there such ample and
varied provision for housing and homeing it. Every
field is a great bird's-nest. The thick, green hedge
that surrounds it, and the hedge-trees arising at one
or two rods' interval, afford nesting and refuge for
myriads of these meadow singers. The groves and
thickets are full of them and their music ; so full,
indeed, that sometimes every leaf seems to pulsate
with a little piping voice in the general concert. Nor
are they confined to the fields, groves, and hedges of

London to John O 1 Groat's. 47

the quiet country. If the census of the sparrows alone
in London could be taken, they would count up to a
larger figure than all the birds of a New England
county would reach. Then there is another interest-
ing feature of this companionship. A great deal of it
lasts through the entire year. There are ten times as
many birds in England as in America in the winter.
Here the fields are green through the coldest months.
No deep and drifting snows cover a frozen earth for ten
or twelve weeks, as with us. There is plenty of shelter
and seeds for birds that can stand an occasional frost or
wintry storm, and a great number of them remain the
whole year around the English homesteads.

If such a difference were a full compensation, our
North American birds make up in dress what they fall
short of English birds in voice and musical talent. The
robin redbreast, and the goldfinch come out in brighter
colors than any other beaux and belles of the season
here ; but the latter is only a slender- waisted brunette,
and the former a plump, strutting little coxcomb, in a
mahogany-coloured waistcoat. There is nothing here
approaching in vivid colors the New England yellow-
bird, hang-bird, red-bird, indigo-bird, or even the blue-
bird. In this, as well as other differences, Nature ad-
justs the system of compensation which is designed to
equalise the conditions of different countries.

48 A Walk from

CHAPTER IV.

TALK WITH AN OLD MAN ON THE WAY OLD HOUSES IN ENGLAND

THEIR AMERICAN RELATIONSHIPS ENGLISH HEDGES AND HEDGE-
ROW TREES THEIR PROBABLE FATE CHANGE OF BURAL SCENERY

WITHOUT THEM,

FROM Tiptree I had a pleasant walk to Coggeshall,
a unique and antique town, marked by the quaint
and picturesque architecture of the Elizabethean regime.
On the way I met an old man, eighty-three years of
age, busily at work with his wheelbarrow, shovel, and
bush-broom, gathering up the droppings of manure on
the road. I stopped and had a long talk with him,
and learned much of those ingenious and minute in-
dustries by which thousands of poor men house, feed,
and clothe themselves and their families in a country
superabounding with labor. He had nearly filled his
barrow, after trundling it for four miles. He could
sell his little load for 4d. to a neighboring farmer ; but
he intended to keep it for a small garden patch allotted
to him by his son, with whom he lived. These few
square yards of land constituted the microscopic point
of his attachment to that great globe still holding in
reserve unmeasured territories of productive soil, on

London to John C? Groat's. 49

which nor plough, nor spade, nor human foot, nor life,
has ever left a lasting mark. These made his little
farm, as large to him and to his octogenarean sinews
and ambitions as was the Tiptree Estate to Alderman
Mechi. It filled his mind with as busy occupation and
as healthy a stimulus. That rude barrow, with its
clumsy wheel, thinly rimmed with an iron hoop, was
to hnp. what the steam engine, and two miles of iron
tubing, and all its hose-power were to that eminent
agriculturist, of whom the old man spoke in terms of
high esteem as a neighbor, and even as a competitor.
Proportionately they were on the same footing ; the one
with his 170 square acres, the other with his 170 square
feet. It was pleasant and instructive to hear him
speak with such sunny and cheery hope of his earthly
lot and doings. His son was kind and good to him.
He could read, and get many good books. He ate
and slept well. He was poor but comfortable. He
went to church on Sunday, and thought much of
heaven on week days. His cabbages were a wonder;
some with heads as large as half a bushel measure.
He did something very respectable in the potato and
turnip line. He had grown beans and beets which
would show well in any market. He always left a
strip or corner for flowers. He loved to grow them ;
they did him good, and stirred up young man feelings

50 A Walk from

in him. He went on in this way with increased ani-
mation, following the lead of a few questions I put in
occasionally to give direction to the narrative of his
experience. How much I wished I could have photo-
graphed him as he stood leaning on his shovel, his
wrinkled face and gray, thin hair moistened with per-
spiration, while his coat lay inside out on one of the
handles of his barrow! The July sun, that warmed
him at his work, would have made an interesting pic-
ture of him, if some one could have held a camera to
its eye at the moment. I added a few pennies to his
stock-in-trade, and continued my walk, thinking much
of that wonderful arrangement of Providence by which
the infinite alternations and gradations of human life
and condition are adjusted; fitting a separate being,
experience, and attachment to every individual heart ;
training its tendrils to cling all its life long to one
slightly individualised locality, which another could
never call home ; giving itself and all its earthly hopes
to an occupation which another would esteem a prison
discipline ; sucking the honey of contentment out of a
condition which would be wormwood to another person
on the same social level.

On reaching Coggeshall, I became again the guest
of a Friend, who gave me the same old welcome and
hospitality which I have so often received from the mem-

London to John O 'Groat's. 51

bers of that society. After tea, he took me about the
town, and showed me those buildings so interesting to
an American low, one-story houses, with thatched
roofs, clay-colored, wavy walls, rudely-carved lintels,
and iron-sash windows opening outward on hinges
like doors, with squares of glass 3 inches by 4 ; houses
which were built before the keel of the May-Flower
was laid, which conveyed the Pilgrims to Plymouth
Eock. Here, now ! see that one on the other side of
the street, looking out upon a modern and strange
generation through two ivy-browed eyes just lighted
up to visible speculation by a single candle on the
mantel-piece ! A very animated and respectable baby
was carried out of that door in its mother's arms, and
baptised in the parish church, before William Shake-
speare was weaned. There is a younger house near
by, which was a century old when Washington was
born. These unique, old dwellings of town, village,
and hamlet in England, must ever possess an interest
to the American traveller which the grand and majestic
cathedrals, that fill him with so much admiration, can-
not inspire. We link the life of our nation more
directly to these humbler buildings. Our forefathers
went out of these houses to the New World. The log
huts they first erected served them and their families
as homes for a few years ; then were given to their
E 2

52 A Walk from

horses and cattle for stabling ; then were swept away,
as too poor for either man or beast. The second gene-
ration of houses made greater pretentions to comfort,,
and had their day, then passed away. They were
nearly all one-story, wooden buildings, with a small
apartment on each side of a great chimney, and a little
bedroomage in the garret for children. Then followed
the large, red New England mansion, broadside to
the road, two stories high in front, with nearly a rood
of back roof declining to within five or six feet of the
ground, and covering a great, dark kitchen, flanked on
one side by a bed-room, and on the other by the but-
tery. A ponderous chimney arose out of the middle of
the building, giving a fireplace of eight feet back to the
kitchen, and one of half the same dimensions to each of
the other two large rooms the north and south. For,
like the republic they founded, its forefathers and ours
divided their dwellings by a kind of Mason and Dixon's
Line, into two parts, giving them these sectional appel-
lations which have represented such antagonisms and
made us such trouble. Every one of these old-fashioned
houses had its " North " and " South " rooms on the
ground-floor, and duplicates, of the same size and
name, above, divided by the massive, hollow tower
called a chimney. A double front door, with pannels
scrolled with rude carving, opened right and left into

London to John O 1 Groat's.

53

the portly building, which, in the tout ensemble, looked
like a New England gentleman of the olden time, in
his cocked hat, and hair done up in a queue. These
were the houses built "when George the Third was
Bong." In these were born the men of the American
Revolution. They are the oldest left in the land ;
and, like the Revolutionary pensioners, they are fast
disappearing. In a few years, it will be said the last
of them has been levelled to the ground, just as the
paragraph will circulate through the newspapers that
the last soldier of the War of Independence is dead.

Thus, the young generation in America, now reciting
in our schools the rudimental facts of the common
history of the English-speaking race, will come to the
meridian of manhood at a time when the three first
generations of American houses shall have been swept
away. But, travelling over a space of three centuries'
breadth, they will see, in these old English dwellings,
where the New World broke off from the Old the
houses in which the first settlers of New England were
born; the churches and chapels in which they were
baptised, and the school-houses in which they learned
the alphabet of the great language that is to fill the
earth with the speech of man's rights and Grod's glory.
One hundred millions, speaking the tongue of Shakes-
peare and Milton on the American continent, and as

54 A Walk from

many millions more on continents more recently settled
by the same race, across the ocean, and across century-
seas of time, shall moor their memories to these humble
dwellings of England's hamlets, and feel how many
taut and twisted liens attach them to the motherland of
mighty nations.

On reckoning up the log of my first day's walk, I
found I had made full twelve miles by road and field ;
and was more than satisfied with such a trial of country
air and exercise, and with the enjoyments of its scenery
and occupations. The next day I made a longer
distance still, from Coggeshall to Great Bardfield, or
about eighteen miles ; and felt at the end that I had
established a reasonable claim to convalescence. The
country on the way was marked by the quiet and happy
features of diversified plenty. The green and gold of
pastures, meadows, and wheatfields ; the picturesque
interspersion of cottages, gardens, stately mansions,
parks and lawns, all enlivened by a well-proportioned
number of mottled cows feeding or lying along the
brook-banks, and sheep grazing on the uplands, all
these elements of rural life and scenery were blended
with that fortuitous felicity which makes the charm of
Nature's country pictures.

At Bardfield I was again homed for the night by a
Friend ; and after tea made an evening walk with him

London to John O Groat's. 55

about the farm of a member of the same society, living
in the outskirts of the town, who cultivates about 400
acres of excellent land, and is considered one of the
most practical and successful agriculturists of Essex.
His fields were larger and fewer than I had noticed on
my walk in a farm of equal size. This feature indicates
the modern improvements in English farming more
prominently to the cursory observer than any other
that attracts his eye. It is a rigidly utilitarian
innovation on the old system, that does not at all
promise to improve the picturesque aspect of the
country. To " reconstruct the map " of a county, by
wire-fencing it into squares of 100 acres each, after
grubbing up all the hedges and hedge-trees, would
doubtless add seven and a quarter per cent, to the
agricultural production of the shire, and gratify many
a Grradgrind of materialistic economy; but who would
know England after such a transformation ? One
would be prone to reiterate Patrick's exclamation of
surprise, when he first shouldered a gun and tested the
freedom of the forest in America. Seeing a small bird
in the top of a tree, he pointed the fowling-piece in that
direction, turned away his face, and fired. A tree-toad
fell to the ground from an agitated branch. The
exulting Irishman ran and picked it up in triumph, and
held it out at arm's length by one of its hind legs,

56 A Walk from

exclaiming, "And how it alters a bird to shoot its
feathers off, to be sure!" It would alter England
nearly as much in aspect, if the unsparing despotism of
s. d. should root out the hedge-row trees, and
substitute invisible lines of wire for the flowering
hawthorn as a fencing for those fields which now look
so much like framed portraits of Nature's best painting.
The tendency of these utilitarian times may well
occasion an unpleasant concern in the lovers of English
rural scenery. What changes may come in the wake
of the farmer's steam-engine, steam-plough, or under
the smoke-shadows from his factory-like chimney,
these recent " improvements " may suggest and induce.
One can see in any direction he may travel these changes
going on silently. Those little, unique fields, defined
by lines and shapes unknown to geometry, are going
out of the rural landscape. And when they are gone,
they will be missed more than the amateurs of agri-
cultural artistry imagine at the present moment. What
some one has said of the peasantry, may be said, with
almost equal deprecation, of these picturesque tit-bits
of land, which,

" Once destroyed, never can be restored."

And destroyed they will be, as sure as science. As
large farms are swallowing up the little ones between

London to John O 1 Groat's. 57

them, so large fields are swallowing these interesting
patches, the broad-bottomed hedging of which some-
times measures as many square yards as tha space it
encloses.

There is much reason to fear that the hedge trees
will, in the end, meet with a worse fate still. Prac-
tical farmers are beginning to look upon them with an
evil eye an eye sharp and severe with pecuniary specu-
lation; that looks at an oak or elm with no artist's
reverence ; that darts a hard, dry, timber-estimating
glance at the trunk and branches; that looks at the
circumference of its cold shadow on the earth beneath,
not at the grand contour and glorious leafage of its
boughs above. The farmer who was taking us over
his large and highly-cultivated fields, was a man of wide
intelligence, of excellent tastes, and the means where-
withal to give them free scope and play. His library
would have satisfied the ambition of a student of history
or belles lettres. His gardens, lawn, shrubbery, and
flowers would grace the mansion of an independent
gentleman. He had an eye to the picturesque as well
as practical. But I could not but notice, as significant
of the tendency to which I have referred, that, on pass-
ing a large, outbranching oak standing in the boundary
of two fields, he remarked that the detriment of its
shadow could not have been less than ten shillings a

58 A Walk from

year for half a century. As we proceeded from field to
field, he recurred to the same subject by calling our
attention to the circumference of the shadow cast on
the best land of the farm by a thrifty, luxuriant ash,
not more than a foot in diameter at the butt. Up to
the broad rim of its shade, the wheat on each side of
the hedge was thick, heavy-headed and tall, but within
the cool and sunless circle the grain and grass were so
pale and sickly that the bare earth would have been
relief to a farmer's eye.

The three great, distinctive graces of an English
landscape are the hawthorn hedges, the hedge-row
trees, and the everlasting and unapproachable greeness
of the grass-fields they surround and embellish. In
these beautiful features, England surpasses all other
countries in the world. These make the peculiar charm
of her rural scenery to a traveller from abroad. These
are the salient lineaments of Motherland's face which
the memories of myriads she has sent to people
countries beyond the sea cling to with such fondness ;
memories that are transmitted from generation to
generation; which no political revolutions nor sever-
ances affect ; which are handed down in the unwritten
legends of family life in the New World, as well as in
the warp and woof of American literature and history.
"Will the utilitarian and unsparing science of these

London to John O* Groat's.

59

latter days, or of the days to come, shear away these
beautiful tresses, and leave the brow and temples of the
Old Country they have graced bare and brown under
the bald and burning sun of material economy ? It is
not an idle question, nor too early to ask it. It is a
question which will interest more millions of the Eng-
lish race on the American continent than these home-
islands will ever contain. There are influences at work
which tend to this unhappy issue. Some of these have
been already indicated, and others more powerful still
may be mentioned.

Agriculture in England has to run the gauntlet of
many pressing competitions, and carry a heavy burden
of taxation as it runs. These will be noticed hereafter,
in their proper connection. Farming, therefore, is
being reduced to a rigid science. Every acre of land
must be put up to its last ounce of production. Every
square foot of it must be utilised to the growth of
something for man or beast. Manures for different
soils are tested with as much chemical precision as
ever was quinine for human constitutions. Dynameters
are applied to prove the power of working machinery.
Labor is scrutinised and economised, and measured
closely up to the value of farthing's-worth of capacity.
A shilling's difference per acre in the cost of ploughing
by horse-flesh or steam brings the latter into the field.

60 A Walk from

The sound of the flail is dying out of the land, and
soon will be heard no more. Even threshing machines
worked by horses are being discarded, as too slow and
old-fashioned. Locomotive steam engines, on broad-
rimmed wheels, may be met on the turnpike road, tra-
velling on their own legs from farm to farm to thresh
out wheat, barley, oats, and beans, for a few pence per
bushel. They make nothing of ascending a hill without
help, or of walking across a ploughed field to a rick-
yard. Iron post and rail fencing, in lengths of twenty
feet on wheels, drawn about by a donkey, bids fair to
supersede the old wooden hurdles for sheep fed on
turnips or clover. It is an iron age, and wire fencing
is creeping into use, especially in the most scientifically
cultivated districts of Scotland, where the elements and
issues of the farmer's balance-sheet are looked to with
the most eager concern. Iron wire grows faster than
hawthorn or buckthorn. It doubtless costs less. It
needs no yearly trimming, like shrubs with sap and
leaves. It does not occupy a furrow's width as a boun-
dary between two fields. It may be easily transposed
to vary enclosures. It is not a nesting place for de-
structive birds or vermin. These and other arguments,
of the same utilitarian genus, are making perceptible
headway. Will they ever carry the day against the
green hedges ? I think they would, very soon, if the

London to John O J Groat's. 61

English farmer owned the land he cultivates. But
such is rarely the case. Still, this fact may not pre-
vent the final consummation of this policy of material
interest. In a great many instances, the tenant might
compromise with the landlord in such a way as to
bring about this " modern improvement." And a com-
paratively few instances, showing a certain per centage
of increased production per acre to the former, and a
little additional rentage to the latter, would suffice to
give the innovation an impulse that would sweep away
half the hedges of the country, and deface that picture
which so many generations have loved to such enthu-
siasm of admiration.

"Will the trees of the hedge-row be exposed to the
same end ? I think they will. Though trees are the
most sacred things the earth begets in England, as
has already been said, the farmer here looks at them
with an evil eye, as horseleeches that bleed to death
long stretches of the land he pays 2 per acre for
annually to his landlord. The hedge, however wide
bottomed, is his fence ; and fencing he must have.
But these trees, arising at narrow intervals from the
hedge, and spreading out their deadening shades upon
his wheat-fields on either side, are not useful nor orna-
mental to him. They may look prettily, and make a
nice picture in the eyes of the sentimental tourist or

62 A Walk from

traveller, but he grudges the ground they cover. He
could well afford to pay the landlord an additional
rentage per annum more than equal to the money
value of the yearly growth of these trees. Besides,
the landlord has, in all probability, a large park of
trees around his mansion, and perhaps compact plan-
tations on land unsuited to agriculture. Thus the high
value of these hedge-row trees around the fields of his
tenant, which he will realise on the spot, together with
some additional pounds in rent annually to himself and
heirs, would probably facilitate this levelling arrange-
ment in face of all the restrictions that the law of
entail might seem to throw in the way.

If, therefore, the hedges of England disappear before
the noiseless and furtive progress of utilitarian science,
the trees that rise above them in such picturesque ranks
will be almost certain to go with them. Then, indeed,
a change will come over the face of the country, which
will make it difficult for one to recognise it who
daguerreotyped its most beautiful features upon his
memory before they were obliterated by these latter-
day " improvements."

London to John (J Groat's. 63

CHAPTER V.

A FOOTPATH WALK AND ITS INCIDENTS HARVEST ASPECTS ENGLISH

AND AMERICAN SKIES HUMBLER OBJECTS OF CONTEMPLATION

THE DONKEY: ITS USES AND ABUSES.

IMMEDIATELY after breakfast the following morn-
ing, my kind host accompanied me for a mile on
my walk, and put me on a footpath across the fields,
by which I might save a considerable distance on the
way to Saffron Walden, where I proposed to spend
the sabbath. After giving me minute directions as to
the course I was to follow, he bade me good-bye, and
I proceeded on at a brisk pace through fields of wheat
and clover, greatly enjoying the scenery, the air, and
exercise. Soon I came to a large field quite recently
ploughed up clean, footpath and all. Seeing a gate at
each of the opposite corners, I made my way across the
furrows to the one at the left, as it seemed to be more
in the direction indicated by my host. There the path
was again broad and well-trodden, and I followed it
through many fields of grain yellowing to the harvest,
until it opened into the main road. This bore a little
more to the left than I expected, but, as I had never

64 A Walk from

travelled it before, I believed it was all right. Thet-
ford was half way to Saffron Walden, and there I had
intended to stop an hour or two for dinner and rest,
then push on to the end of the day's walk as speedily
as possible. At about noon, I came suddenly down
upon the town, which seemed remarkably similar to
the one I had left, in size, situation, and general fea-
tures. The parish church, also, bore a strong resem-
blance to the one I had noticed the previous evening.
These old Essex towns are " as much alike as two peas,"
and you must make a note of it, as Captain Cuttle says,
was the thought first suggested by the coincidence. I
went into a cosy, clean-faced inn on the main street,
and addressed myself with much satisfaction to a short
season of rest and refreshment, exchanging hot and
dusty boots for slippers, and going through other pre-
liminaries to a comfortable time of it. Rang the bell
for dinner, but before ordering it, asked the waiting-
maid, with a complacent idea that I had improved my
walking pace, and made more than half the way :

" How far is it to Saffron Walden ?"

" Twelve miles, Sir."

" Twelve miles, indeed ! Why, it is only twelve
miles from Great Bardfield ! "

" Well, this is Great Bardfield, Sir."

" Great Bardfield ! What ! How is this ! What

London to John O Groat's. 65

do you mean ?" She meant what she said, and it was
as true as two and two make four ; and she was not to
be beaten out of it by a stare of astonishment, however
a discomfited man might expand his eyes with wonder,
or cloud his face with chagrin. It was a patent fact.
There, on the opposite side of the street, was the house
in which I slept the night before ; and here, just coming
up to the door of the inn, was the good lady of my host.
Her form and voice, and other identifications, dispelled
the mist of the mistake ; and it came out as clear as day
that I had followed the direction of my host, to bear to
the left, far too liberally, and that I had been walking
at my best speed in a "vicious circle" for full two hours
and a half, and had landed just where I commenced, at
least within the breadth of a narrow street of the same
point.

My good friends urged me to stop and dine with
them, and then make a fair start for the end of my
week's journey. But it was still twelve miles to Saffron
Walden, and I was determined to put half of them
behind me before dinner. So, taking a second leave of
them in the course of three hours, I set out again on
my walk, a wiser man in the practical understanding
of the proverb, " The longest way around is the shortest
way there." At 2 P.M. I reached Thetford, and recti-
fied my first notion of the town, formed when I mistook

66 A Walk from

it for Bardfield. Having made six miles extra between
the two points, I resumed my walk after a short delay
at the latter.

The weather was glorious. A cloudless sun shone
upon a little sky-crystalled world of beauty, smaller in
every dimension than you ever see in America. And
this is a feature of English scenery that will strike the
American traveller most impressively at the first glance,
whether he looks at it by night or day. It is not that
Nature, in adjusting the symmetries of her scenic struc-
tures, nicely apportions the skyscape to the landscape of
a country merely for artistic effect. It is not because
the island of Great Britain is so small in circumference
that the sky is proportioned to it, as the crystal is to
the dial of a watch ; that it is so apparently low ; that
the stars it holds to its moist, blue bosom are so near at
midnight, and the sun so large at noon. It comes,
doubtless, from that constant humidity of the atmo-
sphere which distinguishes the climate of England, and
gives to both land and sky an aspect which is quite
unknown to our great western continent. An Ameri-
can, after having habituated himself to this aspect, on
returning to his own country, will be almost surprised
at a feature of its scenery which he never noticed before.
He will be struck at the loftiness of the sky ; at the
vividness of its blue and gold, the sharp, unsoftened,

London to John O Groat's. 67

light of the stars, and, as it were, the contracted pupil
of the sun's eye at mid-day. The sunset glories of our
western heavens play upon a ground of rigid blue.
" The Northern Lights," which, at their winter even-
ing illuminations, seem to have shredded into wavy
filaments all the rainbows that have spanned the cham-
bers of the east since the Flood, and to upspring, in
mirthful fantasy, to hang their infinitely-tinted tresses
to the zenith's golden diadem of stars even they sport
upon the same lofty concave of dewless blue, which
looks through and through the lacework and ever-
changing drapery of their mingled hues in the most
witching mazes of their nightly waltz, giving to each
a definiteness that our homely Saxon tongue might fit
with a name.

But here, on the lower grounds of instructive medi-
tation, is a humbler individuality of the country to
notice. Here is the most sadly abused and melancholy
living creature in all England's animal realm that meets
me in the midst of these reflections on things supernal
and glorious. I will let the Northern Lights go, with
their gorgeous pantomimes and midnight revelries, and
have a moment's communing with this unfortunate
quadruped. It is called in derision here a "donkey"
but an ass, in a more generous time, when one of his
race and size bore upon his back into the Holy City

F2

68 A Walk from

the World's Saviour and Ee-Creator. Poor, libelled,
hopeless beast ! I pity you from my heart's heart.
How I wish for Sterne's pen to do you some measure
of justice or condolence under this heavy load of oppro-
brium that bends your back and makes your life so
sunless and bitter ! Come here, sir ! here is a biscuit
for you, of the finest wheat ; few of your race get such
morsels ; so, eat it and be thankful. What ears ! No
wonder our friend Patrick called you " the father of all
rabbits " at first sight. No ! don't turn away your
head, as if I were going to strike you.

Most animals are best described from a certain point
of view, in a fixed and quiescent attitude. But the
donkey should be taken in the very act of this charac-
teristic motion. You put out your hand in the gentlest
manner to pat any one of them you meet, and he will
instinctively turn away his head for fear of a beating.

There is an interesting speculation now coming up
among modern reveries in regard to the immortality of
certain animals of great intelligence and domestic vir-
tues. A large and tender kindness of disposition is the
father of the thought, it may be ; but the thought seems
to gain ground and take shape, that so much of appa-
rently human mind and heart as the dog possesses
cannot be destined to annihilation at his death, but
must live and enlarge in another sphere of existence.

London to John O Groat's. 69

Having thus opened, if it may be said reverently, a
back-door into immortality for sagacious and affec-
tionate dogs and horses, they leave it ajar for the
admission of animals of less intelligence even for all
the kinds that Noah took into the ark, perhaps, although
the theory is still nebulous and undefined. Now, I
would beg the kind-hearted adherents to this theory
not to think I am seeking to play off a satirical plea-
santry upon it, if I express a hope, which is earnest
and true, that, if there be an immortality for any class
of dumb animals, the donkey shall go into it first, and
have a better place in it than their parlor dogs or
nicely-groomed horses. Evidently they are building
up a claim to this illustrious distinction of another
existence for these pets on the sole ground of merit,
not of works, even, but of mere intelligence, fidelity,
and affection. Granted ; but the donkey should go in
first and take the highest place on that basis. When
you come to that standard of moral measurement, it
may be claimed as among the highest of human as
well as animal virtues, " to learn to suffer and be
strong." And this virtue the donkey has learned and
practised incomparably beyond any other creature that
ever walked on four legs since the Flood. Let these
good people remember that their fanciful and romantic
favoriteisms are not to rule in the destinies awarded to

70 A Walk from

the infinitesimally human spirits of domestic animals
in another world, if another be in reserve for them.
Let them remember that their softly-cushioned dogs,
and horses so delicately clad, and fed, and fondled,
have had a pretty good time of it in this life, and that
in another the poor, despised, abused donkey, going
about begging, with such a long and melancholy face,
for withered cabbage leaves and woody-grained turnips
cast out and trodden under feet of happier animals,
that this meek little creature, kicked, cuffed, and club-
beaten all the way from hopeless youth to an igno-
minious grave, will carry into another world merits
and mementoes of his earthly lot that will obtain, if
not entitle him to, some compensation in the award of
a future condition. It is treading on delicate ground
even to set one foot within the pale of their unscriptural
theory ; but as many of them hold the Christian faith
in pureness of living and doctrine, let me remind them
of that parable which shows so impressively how the
disparities in human condition here are reversed in the
destinies of the great hereafter.

But, to return to the earthly lot and position of this
poor, libelled animal. Among all the four-footed crea-
tures domesticated to the service of man, this has always
been the veriest scapegoat and victim of the cruelist
and crabbedest of human dispositions. Truly, it has

London to John O' Groat's. 71

ever been born unto sorrow, bearing all its life long a
weight of abuse and contumely which would break the
heart of a less sensitive animal in a single week. From
the beginning it has been the poor man's beast of bur-
den; and "pity 'tis 'tis true," poor men, in all the
generations of human poverty, have been far too prone
to harshness of temper and treatment towards the
beasts that serve them and share their lot of humble
life. The donkey is made a kind of Ishmaelite in the
great family of domestic animals. He is made, not
born so. He is beaten about the head unmercifully
with a heavy stick, and then jeered at for being stupid
and obstinate ! just as if any other creature, of four or
two legs, would not be stupid after such fierce conges-
tion of the brain. His long ears subject him to a more
cruel prejudice than ever color engendered in the circle
of humanity but just above him. True, he is rather
unsymmetrical in form. His head is disproportionately
long and large, quite sufficient in these dimensions to
fit a camel. He is generally a hollow-backed, pot-
bellied creature, about the size of a yearling calf, with
ungainly, sloping haunches, and long, coarse hair.
But nearly all these deformities come out of the
shameful treatment he gets. You occasionally meet
one that might hold up its head in any animal so-
ciety ; with straight back, symmetrical body and limbs,

72 A Walk from

and hair as soft and sleek as the fur of a Maltese cat ;
with contented face, and hopeful and happy eyes, show-
ing that he has a kind master.

The donkey is really a useful and valuable animal,
which might be introduced into America with great
advantage to our farmers. I know of no animal of its
size so tough and strong. It is astonishing, as well as
shocking, to see what loads he is made to draw here.
The vehicle to which he is usually harnessed is a heavy,
solid affair, frequently as large as our common horse-
carts. He is put to all kinds of work, and is almost
exclusively the poor man's beast of burden and travel.
In cities and large towns, his cart is loaded with the
infinitely- varied wares of street trade; with cabbages,
fish, fruit, or with some of the thousand-and-one nick-
nacks that find a market among the masses of the
common people. At watering-places, or on the " com-
mons " or suburban playgrounds of large towns, he is
brought out in a handsome saddle, or a well-got-up
little carriage, and let by the hour or by the ride to
invalid adults, or to children bubbling over with life.
Here, although the everlasting club, to which he is
born, is wielded by his driver, he often looks comfort-
able and sleek, and sometimes wears a red ribbon at
each ear. It would not pay to bring on to the ground
the scrawny, bony creature that generally tugs in the

London to John O* Groat's. 73

costermonger's cart. It is in the coal region or trade
that you meet with him and his driver in their worst
apostacy from all that is seemly in man or beast. To
watch the poor creature, begrimed with coal-dust, wrig-
gling up a long, steep hill, with a load four times his
own weight, griping with his little sheep-footed hoofs
into the black, slimy pavement of the road, while his
tall, sooty-faced and harsh-voiced master, perhaps sit-
ting on the top or on a shaft, is punching and beating
him ; to see this is enough to stir up the old adam in
the meekest Christian to emotions of pugilistic indig-
nation. It has often cost me a doubtful and protracted
effort to keep it down. Indeed, I have often yielded to
it so far as to wish that once more the poor creature
might be honored of Orod with His gift to Balaam's
ass, and be able to speak, bolt outright, an indignant
remonstrance, in human speech, against such treatment.
It would serve them right ! these lineal descendants of
Balaam, who have inherited his club and wield it more
cruelly.

A word or two more about this animal, and I will
pass on to others of more dignity of position. He is
the cheapest as well as smallest beast of burden to be
found in Christendom. You may buy one here for
twenty or thirty English shillings. I am confident
that they would be extremely serviceable in America,

74 ^ Walk from

if once introduced. It costs but very little to keep
them, and they will do all kinds of work up to the
draft of 600 or 800 Ibs. You frequently see here a
span of them trotting off in a cart, with brisk and even
step. Sometimes they are put on as leaders to a team
of horses. I once saw on my walk a heavy Lincoln-
shire horse in the shafts, a pony next, and a donkey at
the head, making a team graduated from 18 hands to
6 in height; and all pulling evenly, and apparently
keeping step with each other, notwithstanding the dis-
parity in the length of their legs.

It would be unjust to that goodwill to man and
beast, which is being organised and stimulated in Eng-
land through an infinite number of societies, if I should
omit to state that, at last, a little rill of this benevo-
lence has reached the donkey. That most valuable and
widely-circulated penny magazine, " The British Work-
man," and its little companion for British workmen's
children, " The Band of Hope Eeview," have advocated
the rights and better treatment of this humble domestic
for several years. His cause has also been pleaded in a
packet of little papers called " Leaflets of the Law of
Kindness for the Children." And now, at last, a
wealthy and benevolent champion, on whom the mantle
of Elizabeth Fry, his aunt, has fallen, has taken the
lead in the work of raising the useful creature to the

London to John O 1 Groat's.

75

level of the other animals of the pasture, stable, and
barn-yard. Up to the present time, every creature
that walks on four or two legs, either haired, wooled,
or feathered, with the single exception of the donkey,
has had the door of the Agricultural Exhibition thrown
wide open to it, to enter the lists for prizes or " honour-
able mention," and for general admiration. A pig,
whose legs and eyes have all been absorbed out of sight
by an immense obesity of fat, is often decked with
a ribbon, of the Order of the Grarter genus, as a reward
of merit, or of grace of form and proportions ! Turkeys,
geese, ducks, and hens of different breeds, strut or
waddle off with similar distinctions. As for blood-
horses, bulls, cows, and sheep, one not versed in such
matters might be tempted to think that men, especially
ths poorer sort, were made for beasts, and not beasts
for men. And yet, mirabile dictu ! at these great social
gatherings of man-and-animal kind, there has not been
even " a negro pew" for the donkey. A genuine raw
Guinea negro might have as well entered the Prince of
Wales' Ball in New York barefooted, and offered to
play a voluntary on his banjo for the dancers, as this
despised quadruped have hoped to obtain the entree to
these grand and fashionable assemblies of the shorter-
eared elite of society.

But this prejudice against color and long ears is now

76 A Walk from

going the way of other barbarisms. The gentleman to
whom I have referred, a member of Parliament, whose
means are as large as his benevolence, has taken the
first and decisive step towards raising the donkey to his
true place in society. He has offered a liberal prize
for the best conditioned one exhibited at the next
Agricultural Fair. Since this offer was made, a very
decided improvement has been noticed among the
donkeys of the London costermongers, as if the com-
petition for the first prize was to be a very large one.
It will be a kind of St. Crispin's Day to the whole of
the long-eared race a day of emancipation from forty
centuries of obloquy and oppression. Doubtless they
will be admitted hereafter to the Royal Agricultural
Society's exhibitions, to compete for honors with ani-
mals that have hitherto spurned such association with
contempt.

London to John C? Groat's. 77

CHAPTER VI.

HOSPITALITIES OF " FRIENDS " HARVEST ASPECTS: ENGLISH COUNTRY

INNS ; THEIR APPEARANCE, NAMES AND DISTINCTIVE CHARACTER-
ISTICS. THE LANDLADY I WAITER, CHAMBERMAID AND BOOTS. EXTRA
FEES AND EXTRA COMFORTS.

I BEACHED Safiron Walden at 4 P.M., notwith-
standing my involuntary walk of six extra miles
in the morning. Here I remained over the sabbath,
again enjoying the hospitality of a Friend. And per-
haps I may say it here and now with as much propriety
as at any other time and place, that few persons, outside
the pale of that society, have more frequently or fully
enjoyed that hospitality than myself. This pleasant
experience has covered the space of more than sixteen
years. During this period, with the exception of short
intervals, I have been occupied with movements which
the Friends in England have always regarded with
especial sympathy. This connection has brought me
into acquaintance with members of the society in almost
every town in Great Britain in which they reside ; and
in more than a hundred of their homes I have been
received as a guest with a kindness which will make to
mv life's end one of its sunniest memories.

78 A Walk from

On the following Monday, I resumed my walk north-
ward, after a carriage ride which a Friend kindly gave
me for a few miles on the way. Passed through a
pre-eminently grain producing district. Apparently full
three-fourths of the land were covered with wheat,
barley, oats and beans. The fields of each were larger
than I had noticed before ; some containing 100 acres.
The coming harvest is putting forth the full glory of
its golden promise. The weather is all a farmer could
wish, beautiful, warm and bright. Nature, in every
feature of its various scapes, seems to smile with the joy
of that human happiness which her ministries inspire.
Here, in these still expanses, waving with luxuriant
crops, apparently so thinly peopled, one, forgetting the
immense populations crowded into city spaces, is almost
tempted to ask, where are all the mouths to eat this
wide sea of food for man and beast, softening so gently
into a yellow sheen under the very rim of the distant
horizon ? But, in the great heart of London, beating
with the wants of millions, he will be likely to reverse
the question, and ask, where can one buy bread where-
with to feed this great multitude ?

At Sawston, a rustic little village on the southern
border of Cambridgeshire, I entered upon the enjoy-
ment of English country-inn life with that relish which
no one born in a foreign land can so fully feel as an

London to John O 1 Groat's. 79

American. As one looks upon the living face of some
distinguished celebrity for the first time, after having
had his portrait hung up in the parlor for twenty years,
so an American looks, for the first time, at that great
and picturesque speciality among human institutions,
the village inn of Old England. The like of it he never
saw in his own country and never will. In fact, he
would not like to see it there, plucked up out of its
ancient histories and associations. In the ever-green
foliage of these it stands inwoven, as with its own net-
work of ivy. Other countries, even older than England,
have had their taverns from time immemorial ; but they
are all kept in the back ground of human life. They
do not come out in cotemporaneous history with any
definiteness ; not even accidentally. If a king is mur-
dered in one of them, or if it is the theatre of the most
thrilling romance of love, you do not know whether it
is a building of stone, brick or wood ; whether it is one,
two or three stories in height. No outlines nor aspects
are given you to help to fill up a rational picture of it.
Neither the landlord nor the landlady is drawn as a
representative man or woman. Either might be mis-
taken for a guest in their own house, if seen in hat or
bonnet by a stranger.

But not so of the English Country Inn. It comes
out into the foreground of a thousand interesting his-

8o A Walk from

tories and pictures of common life. In them it has an
individuality as marked as the parish church, couchante
in its wide-rimmed nest of grave stones ; as marked in
unique architecture, location, and surroundings. In
none of these features will you find two alike, if you
travel from one end of the country to the other;
especially among those a century old. You might as
well mistake one of the living animals for the other,
as to mistake " The Blue Boar " for the " Bed Lion."
They differ as much from each other in general make
and aspect as do their nominal prototypes. To give every
one of their thousands " a local habitation and a name "
of striking distinctness, has required an ingenuity which
has produced many interesting feats of house-building
and nomenclature. Both these departments of genius
figure largely in the poetry and classics of the insti-
tution, with which the reading million of America have
been familiar from youth up. And when any of them
come to travel in England, it will greatly enhance their
enjoyment to find that the pictures they have admired
and the descriptions they have read of the famous
country inn have been true to the very life and letter.
All its salient features they recognise at once, and are
ready to exclaim, " How natural ! " meaning by that,
how true is the original to the picture which they have
seen so frequently. If they go far enough, they will

London to John O 'Groat's. 81

find the very original of every one of the hundred
pictures they have seen, painted by pen or pencil.
They will find that all of them have been true copies
from nature. Here is the portly-looking, well-to-do,
two-story tavern, standing out with its comfortable,
cream-colored face broadside to the street. It is repre-
sented in the old engraving with a coach-and-four
drawn up before the door, surrounded by a crowd of
spectators and passengers, some descending or ascend-
ing on ladders over the forward wheels ; some looking
with admiration at the scarlet coats of the pursy and
consequential driver and guard ; some exchanging greet-
ings, others farewell salutations ; ostlers in long waist-
coats, plush or fustian shorts, and yellow leggings,
standing bareheaded with watering-pails at the " 'osses'
'eads;" trunks great and small going up and down;
village boys in high excitement ; village grandfathers
looking very animated ; the landlord, burly, bland, and
happy, with a face as rotund and genial as the full
moon shining upon the scene ; and those round, rosy,
sunny, laughing faces peering out of the windows with
delightful wonderment and exhiliaration, winked at by
the driver, and saluted with a graceful motion of his
whip-handle in recognition of the barmaid, chamber-
maid, and all the other maids of the house. The coach,
with all its picturesque appointments, its four-in-hand,

82 A Walk from

the stirring heraldry of its horn coming down the road,
its rattling wheels, the life and stir aroused and moved
in its wake, all this has gone from the presence of a
higher civilisation. It will never reappear in future
pictures of actual life in England. It is all gone where
the hedges and hedgerow trees will probably go in their
turn. But the same village inn remains, and can be as
easily recognised as a widow in weeds, who still wears a
hopeful face, and makes the best of her bereavement.

But that humbler type of hostelry so often repre-
sented in sketches of English rural life and scenery
the little, cosy, one-story, wayside, or hamlet inn, with
its thatched roof, checker- work window, low door, and
with a loaded hay-cart standing in front of it, while the
driver, in his round wool hat, and in his smock-frock,
is drinking at a pewter mug of beer, with one hand on
his horse's neck this the hand of modern improvements
has not yet reached. This may be found still in a
thousand villages and hamlets, surrounded with all its
rural associations ; the green, the geese, and gray
donkeys feeding side by side ; low-jointed cottages,
with long, sloping roofs greened over with moss or
grass, and other objects usually shadowed dimly in the
background of the picture. It is these quiet hamlets
and houses in the still depths of the country, away
from the noise and bluster of railway life and motion,

London to John O' Groat's. 83

that best represent and perpetuate the primeval charac-
teristics of a nation. These the American traveller will
find invested with all the old charm with which his
fancy clothed them. It will well repay him for a
month's walk to see and enjoy them thoroughly.

In these days of sun-literature, whose letters are
human faces, and whose new volumes are numbered by
the million yearly, without a duplicate to one of them,
I am confident that a volume of these English village
inns of the olden school, in photographs, would com-
mand a ,large sale and admiration in America, merely
as specimens of unique and interesting architecture. A
thousand might be taken, every one as unlike the other
in distinctive form and feature, as every one of the same
number of men would be to the other.

The diversification of names, being more difficult, is
still more remarkable. Although the spread eagle
figures largely as the patron genius of American hotels,
still nine-tenths of them bear the names of states, coun-
ties, towns, or national or local celebrities. But here
natural history comes out strong and wide. The
heraldry of sovereigns, aristocracy, gentry, commercial
and industrial interests, puts up its various arms upon
hundreds of inns in town and country. All occupations
and recreations are well represented. Thus no country
in the world approaches England in the wide scope and
G 2

84 A Walk from

play of hotel nomenclature. Some of the combinations
are exceedingly unique and most interesting in their
incongruity. Dickens has not exaggerated this cha-
racteristic ; not even done it justice in his hotel scenes.
Things are put together on a hundred tavern signs
that were never joined before in the natural or moral
world, and put together frequently in most grotesque
association. For instance, there is a large, first-class
inn right in the very heart of London, which has for a
sign, not painted on a board, but let into the wall of
the upper story, in solid statuary, a huge human
mouth opened to its utmost capacity, and a bull, round
and plump, standing stoutly on its four legs between
the two distended jaws. Now, the leading idea of this
device is involved in a tempting obscurity, which leads
one, at first sight, into different lines of conjecture.
What did the designer of this group of statuary really
intend to represent ? Was it to let the outside world
know that, in that inn, the " Eoast Beef of Old Eng-
land " was always to be found par excellence ? If so,
would a man's mouth swallowing a bull whole, and
apparently alive, with hide and horns, tend to stimu-
late the appetite af a passing traveller, and to draw him
into the establishment ? But leaving these ambiguous
symbols to be interpreted by the passing public accord-
ing to different perceptions of their meaning, how many

London to John O' Groat's. 85

in a thousand would guess aright the name given to the
tavern by these tokens ? Would not ninety-nine in a
hundred say, " The Mouth and Bull," to be sure, not
only on the principle that the major includes the minor,
but also because the human element is entitled to pre-
cedence in the picture ? But the ninety-nine would be
completely mistaken, if they adopted this natural con-
clusion. They would find they had counted without
their host, who knows better than they the relative
position and value of things. What has the law of
logic to do with fat beef! The name of his famous
hotel is " THE BULL AND MOUTH;" and few in Lon-
don have attained to its celebrity as a historical build-
ing. One is apt to wonder if this precedence given to
the beast is really incidental, or adopted to give euphony
to the name of an inn, or whether there is a latent and
spontaneous leaning to such a method of association,
from some cause or other connected with perceptions
of personal comfort afforded at such establishments.
Accidental or intentional, this form of association is
very common. There is no tavern in London better
known than The Elephant and Castle, a designation that
would sound equally well if the two substantives were
transposed. Even the loftiest symbols of sovereignty
often occupy the secondary place in these compound
titles. There are doubtless a hundred inns in Great

86 A Walk from

Britain bearing the name of The Rose and Crown, but
not one, to my knowledge, called "The Crown and
Eose." The same order obtains in sporting sections and
terminology. It is always " The Hare and Hounds ;"
never " Hounds and Hare."

This characteristic in itself is very interesting, and
no American, with an eye to the unique, would like to
see it changed. But if the mere syntax of hotel names
in England is so pleasant for him to study, how much
more admirable is their variety ! He has read at home
of many of them in lively romance and grave history ;
but he finds here that not half has been told him. He
is familiar with the Lions, Bed, White, and Black ; the
Bulls and Boars of the same colors ; the Black and
White Swans and Harts ; the Crown and Anchor, the
Royal George, Queen's Head, and a few others of simi-
lar designation. These names have figured in volumes
of English literature which he has perused. But let
him travel on the turnpike road through country towns
and villages, and he will meet with names he never
thought of before, mounted over the doors of some of
the most comfortable and delightful houses of enter-
tainment for man and beast that can be found in the
world. Here are a few that I have noticed : " The
Three Jolly Butchers," " The Old Mash Tub," " The
Old Mermaid," " The Old Malt Shovel," " The

London to John O Groat's. 87

Chequers," " The Dog-in-Doublet," " Bishop Boni-
face," "The Spotted Cow," "The Green Dragon,"
" The Three Horseshoes," " The Bird-in-Hand," " The
Spare Eib," " The Old Cock," "Pop goes the Weasel."
There are wide spaces between these names which may
be filled up from actual life with numbers of equal
uniqueness. But it is not in architecture nor in name
that the country inn presents its most attractive charac-
teristic. These features merely specialise its outward
corporeity. The living, brightening, all-pervading soul
of the establishment is the LANDLADY. Let her name
be written in capitals evermore. There is nothing so
naturally, speakingly, and gloriously English in the
wide world as she. It is doubtful if the nation is aware
of this, but it is the fact. Her English individuality
stands out embonpoint, rosy, genial, self-complacent,
calm, serene, happyfying, and happy. She is the man
and master of the house. She permeates it with her
rayful presence, and fills it with a pleasant morning in
foggy and blue-spirited days. She it is who greets the
coming and speeds the parting guest with a grace which
suns, with equal light and warmth, both remembrance
and anticipation. It is not put on like a Sunday dress ;
it is not a thin gloss of French politeness that a feather,
blown the wrong way, will brush off. It it not a color ;
it is a quality. You see it breathe and move in her

88 A Walk from

like a nature, not as an art. Let no American travel-
ler fancy he has seen England if he has not seen the
Landlady of the village inn. If he has to miss one,
he had better give up his visit to the Crystal Palace,
Stratford-upon-Avon, Abbottsford, or even the House
of Lords, or Windsor itself. Neither is so perfectly
and exclusively English as the mistress of " The Brindled
Cow," in one of the rural counties of the kingdom.

It would be necessary to coin a new word if one were
sought to contain and convey the distinctive charac-
teristic of inn-life in England. Perhaps homefulness
would do this best, as it would more fully than any
other term describe the coziness, quiet, and comfort to
be enjoyed at these places of entertainment. Not one
in a hundred of them ever heard the sound of the
hotel-going bell, as we hear it in America. You are
not thundered up or down by a vociferous gong. Then
there is no marching nor countermarching of a long
line of waiters in white jackets around the dinner table,
laying down plate, knife, fork, and spoon with uniform
step and motion, as if going through a dress parade or
a military drill. There is no bustle, no noise, no eager
nor anxious look of -served or servants. Every one is
calm, collected, and comfortable. " The cares that
infest the day" do not ride into the presence of that
roast beef and plum pudding on the wrinkles of any

London to John O 1 Groat's. 89

man's forehead, however business affairs may go with
him outside, No one is in a hurry to sit down or to
arise from the table. The whole economy of the esta-
blishment is to make you as much at home as possible ;
to individualise you, as far as it can be done, in every
department of personal comfort. You follow your own
time and inclination, and eat and drink when and how
you please, with others or alone. The congregate sys-
tem is the exception, not the rule. It seldom ever
obtains at breakfast or tea. In many cases you have a
little round table all to yourself at these meals. But
if there is a common table for half a dozen persons, the
tea and toast and other eatables are never aggregated
into a common stock. Each person, if he is a single
guest, has his own allotment, even to a separate teapot.
The table d'hote, if there be one at all, is made up like
a select dinner party, rather early in the morning. If
the guests of the house are not directly invited, they
are asked, in a tone of hospitality, if they will join in
the social meal, the only one got up by the establish-
ment at which the table is not mapped out into separate
holdings, or little independencies of dishes, each bounded
by the wants and capacities of the individual occupant.
The presiding and working faculty of a common
English inn distinguishes it by another salient cha-
racteristic from the hotels of other countries. The

90 A Walk from

landlady is, of course, the president of the establish-
ment, whether or not she calls any man lord in the
retired and family department of the house. But the
actual geranfes, or working corps, with which you have
to do immediately, are three independent and distinct
personages, called the waiter, chambermaid, and boots.
If it were respectful to gender, these might be called
the great triumvirate of the English inn. No traveller,
after a night's lodging and breakfast, will mistake or
confound the prerogatives or perquisites of these officials.
If he is an American, and it be his first experience of
the regime, he will be surprised and puzzled at the
imperium in imperio which his bill, presented to him
on a tea-tray, seems to represent. In no other business
transaction of his life did he ever see the like. It goes
far beyond anything in the line of limited partnership
he ever saw. There is only one partial parallel that
approaches it ; and this comes to his mind as he reads
the several items on his bill. When made out and
interpreted, it comes to this : the proprietor, the waiter,
chambermaid, and boots are independent parties, who get
up a night's lodging and two or three meals for you
on the same footing as four independent underwriters
would take proportionate risks at Lloyds in some ship at
sea. Or, what would put it in simpler form to an unin-
itiated guest, he is apparently first charged for the raw

London to John (J Groat's. 91

provisions he consumes, and for the rent of his bedroom.
This is the proprietor's share. Then, there is a sepa-
rate charge for each of the remaining items of the
entertainment, for cooking and serving up each meal,
for making up your bed, and for blacking your boots ;
just as distinctly as if you had gone out into the town
the previous evening and hired three separate indi-
viduals to perform these services for you ; and as if you
had no right nor reason to expect from the landlord a
dinner all cooked and served, but that you only bought
it in the larder.

Now this is a peculiarity of the English hotel system
that is apt to embarrass travellers from other countries,
especially from America, where no such custom could be
introduced. I do not know how old the custom is in
Great Britain. Doubtless it originated in the almost
universal disposition and habit of Englishmen of drop-
ping gratuities or charity-gifts here and there with
liberal hand, either to obtain or reward extra service
in matters of personal comfort; or to alleviate some case
of actual or simulated suffering that meets them. It
was natural and inevitable that gratuities thus given to
hotel servants frequently to stimulate and reward special
attention should soon become a rule, acting upon guests
like a law of honor. When so many gave, and when
the servants of every hotel expected a gift, a man must

92 A Walk from

feel shabby to go away without dropping a few pennies
into the hands of eager expectants who almost claimed
the gratuity as a right. The worst stage of the system
was when the expected gift was measured by your sup-
posed position and ability, or when the waiter or the
chambermaid, nattering you with what Falstaff would
call an instinctive perception of your dignity, would
say with an asking and hopeful smile, " What you
please, Sir." Now, that was not the question with
you at all. You wanted to know how much each
expected, or how much you must give to acquit your-
self of the charge of being " a screw," when they put
their heads and gains together in conference and com-
parison after you were gone. So, on the whole, it was
a great relief when all these awkward uncertainties of
expectation were cleared up and rectified in the system
now usually adopted.

Whether you be rich or poor, or whatever position or
pretention be attributed to you, the fees of the universal
triumvirate are put down specifically in black and white
among the other charges on your bill. As I hope these
notes may convey some useful information to Americans
who may be about to visit England for the first time, it
may be of some use to them to state what is the usual rule
in this matter at the middle-class hotels in this country;
for with those of the first rank I never have made nor

London to John O* Groat's. 93

ever expect to make any personal acquaintance. A
moderate bill for a day's entertainment will read thus :

*. d.

Tea (bread and butter or toast) 1

Bed 1 6

Breakfast (rasber of bacon, eggs, or cold meats) 1 6

Dinner 2 6

Waiter 9

Chambermaid 6

Boots . . 03

Total 8

These are about the average charges at the middle-class
hotels in Great Britain. Generally the servants' fees
amount to 25 per cent, of the whole bill. These, too,
are graduated to parts of days. The waiter expects 3d.
for every meal he serves ; the chambermaid 6d. for
every bed she makes, and the boots 3d. for doing every
pair of boots, brogans, or shoes. You will pay these
charges with all the better grace and good- will to these
servants when you come to learn that these fees fre-
quently, if not always, constitute all the salary they
receive for hotel service. Even in a great number of
eating-shops the same rule obtains. The penny you
give the waiter, male or female, is all he or she gets for
serving you. Besides this consideration, you get back
much additional personal comfort from these extras.
The waiter serves you with extra satisfaction and
assiduity under their stimulus. He acts the host very

94 A Walk from

blandly. He answers a hundred questions, extraneous
to the meal, with good-natured readiness. He is a good
judge of the weather and its signs. He is well
"posted-up" in the local histories and sceneries of the
place. He can give political information on both sides,
incidents and anecdotes to match, whether you are
Tory, Whig or Radical. If you have a bias in that
direction, he has or has heard some thoughts on Bishop
Colenzo and the Tractarians. In short, he caters to the
humour and disposition of every guest with a happy
facility of adaptation ; and the shilling you give him at
the end of a day's entertainment has been pretty well
earned, if you have availed yourself of all these extra
attentions which he is prepared and expecting to give
for it.

The same may be said of the chambermaid. She is
not the taciturn invisible that steals in and out of your
bed-room and does it up when you are at breakfast or
at your out-door business whom you never see, except
by sheer accident, as in the American hotel. She is an
important and prominent personage in the English inn.
She is a kind of mistress of the robes, and exercises her
prerogative with much conscious dignity and self-satis-
faction ; and, what is better, with great satisfaction to
yourself. No other subordinate official or servant
trenches or poaches upon her preserves. She it is who

London to John O* Groat's. 95

precedes you up stairs with a candle, on a broad-
bottomed brass candlestick, polished to its highest
lustre. She conducts you to your room as if you
were her personal guest, invited and expected a month
ago. She opens the door with amiable complacency, as
if welcoming you to a hospitality which she had pre-
pared for you with especial care, before she knew you
had arrived in town. She invites you, by a movement
of her eyes, to glance at the room and see how comfort-
able it is ; how round and soft is the bed, how white
and well-aired are the sheets and pillows, how nice the
curtains, how clean and tidy the carpet, in short, how
everything is fitted to incline y0u to " rest and be
thankful." And then the cheery "good night!" she
bids you is said with a tone that is. worth the sixpence
she expects in the morning ; and you pay it, too, with
a much better grace than could be expected from an
American recently arrived in the country.

And the " boots " is a character, too, unmixedly and
interestingly English, in name, person, character and
position. In the first of these qualities he is unique,
being called after the subject of his occupation. He is
an important personage, and generally has his own bell
in the dining-room, surmounted by his name, to be
called for any service coming within his department.
And this is quite a wide one, including a great variety

96 A Walk from

of errandry and porterage, as well as polishing boots and
shoes. He is very helpful in a great many different
ways, and often very intelligent, and knows all about
the streets, the railway trains, the omnibuses, cabs, &c.,
and will assist you in such matters with good grace and
activity. He may have got in the way of putting the
H before the eggs instead of the ham ; but he is just,
as good for all that, and more interesting besides. So
you do not grudge the 3d. you give him daily for his
strictly professional services, or the extra 6d. he expects
for carrying your carpet-bag or portmanteau to the
railway-station.

Thus, although this feeing of servants may seem at
first strange to an American traveller in England, and
may occasion him some perplexity and even annoyance,
he will soon become accustomed to it ; and in making
up the balance-sheet of the additional cost on one side
and the additional comfort on the other which the
system produces, he will come even to the mathematical
conclusion, " if to equals you add equals, the sums will
be equals."

London to John O 1 Groat's.

97

CHAPTER VII.

LIGHT OF HUMAN LIVES. PHOTOGRAPHS AND BIOGEAPHS. THE LATE

JONAS WEBB, HIS LIFE, LABORS AND MEMORY.

THE next morning I resumed my walk and visited
a locality bearing a name and an association of
world- wide celebrity and interest. It is the name of a
small rural hamlet, hardly large enough to be called a
village, and marked by no trait of nature or art to give
it distinction.

There are conditions and characteristics both in the
natural and moral world which can hardly be described
fully in Saxon, Latin or Greek terminology, even with
the largest license of construction. There are attributes
or qualities attaching to certain locations, of the simp-
lest natural features, which cannot even be hinted at
or suggested by the terms, geography, topography, or
biography. Put the three together and condense or
collocate their several meanings in one compound qualifi-
cation which you can write and another spell, and you
do not compass the signification you want to convey.
The soul of man has its immortality, and the feeblest
H

98 A Walk from

minded peasant believes he shall wear it through the
ages of the great hereafter. The literature of human
thoughts claims a life that shall endure as long as the
future existence of humanity. The memory of many
human actions and lives puts in a plea and promise of a
duration that shall distance the sun's, and overlap upon
the bright centuries of eternity. The human body,
even, is promised its resurrection by the divinest
authority and illustration, and waits hopefully, under
all its pains and weaknesses, for the glory to be revealed
in it, when the earth on which it dwells shall have
become "a forgotten circumstance." Human loves,
remembrances, faiths and fellowships lift up all their
meek hands to the Father of Spirits, praying to be
lifted up into His great immortality, and to be permit-
ted to take with them unbroken the associations that
sweetened this earthly life. Many humble souls that
have passed through the furnace of affliction, poverty,
and trial seven times heated, and heated daily here,
have believed that He who went up through the same
suffering to His great White Throne, would let them
sing beside the crystal waters the same good old psalm
tunes and songs of Sion which they sang under the
willows of this lower world of tears and tribulation.
How all the sparks of the undying life in man fly
upward to the zenith of this immortality ! You may

London to John O 1 Groat's.

99

call the steep flights of this faith pleasant and poetical
diversions of a fervid imagination, but they are winged
with the pinions that angels lift when they soar ; pinions
less etherial than theirs, but formed and plumed to
beat upward on the Milky Way to their Source, instead
of swimming in the thinly-starred cerulean, in which
spirits, never touched with the down or dust of human
attributes, descend and ascend on their missions to the
earth. Who can have the heart to handle harshly
these beautiful faiths? to say, this hope may go up,
but this must go down to the darkness of annihilation!
Was it irreverent in the pious singing master of a New
England village, when he said, that often, while re-
turning home late on bright winter nights, he had
dropped the reins upon his horse's neck, and sung Old
Hundred from the stars, set as notes to that holy tune,
when they first sang together in the morning of the
creation ? What spiritual good or Christian end would
be gained, to break up the charm and cheer of this his
belief? or to dispel that other confidence, which so
helped him to bear earth's trials, that one day he should
join all the spirits of the just made perfect, and all the
high angels in heaven, and, on the plane of that golden
gamut, they should sing together their hymns of joy
and praise, in that same, good old tune, from those same
star-notes, which a thousand centuries should not deflect
. H 2

ioo A Walk from

nor transpose from their first order within those ever-
lasting staves and bars !

If the spirit's faith be allowed such wide confidences
as these ; if it may carry up into the invisible and
infinite so many precious relics from the wreck of time,
so many human circumstances and associations, why
may it not take with it, to hang up in its heaven,
photographs of those earthly localities rendered immor-
tal here by the lives of good and great men ? Such a
life is a sun, and it casts a disk of light upon the very
earth on which it shines ; not that flashy circle which
the lens of the microscope casts upon the opposite wall,
to show how scarcely visible mites may be magni-
fied ; but a soft and steady illumination that does not
dim under the beating storms and bleaching dews of
centuries, but grows brighter and brighter, as if the
seed-rays that made it first multiplied themselves from
year to year. The earth becomes more and more thickly
dotted with these permanent disks of light, and each is
visited by pilgrims, who go and stand with reverence
and admiration within the cheering circle. Shakespeare's
thought-life threw out a brilliant illumination, of wide
circumference, at Stratford-upon-Avon, and no locality
in England bears a biograph more venerated than the
birth-place of the great poet. His thought-life was a
sun that never will set as long as this above us shines.

London to John O Groat's. 101

It is rising every year to new generations that never
saw its rays before. "When he laid down his pen, at
the end of his last drama, the whole English-speaking
race in both hemispheres did not number twice the pre-
sent population of London. Xow, .seventy-five millions,
peopling mighty continents, speak the tongue he raised
to be the grandest of all earth's speeches ; and those
who people the antipodes claim to offer the best homage
to his genius. Thus it will go on to the end of time.
As the language he clothed with such power and might
shall spread itself over the earth, and be spoken, too,
by races born to another tongue, his life-rays will per-
meate the minds of countless myriads, and the more
widely they diverge and the farther they reach, the
brighter and warmer will be the glow and the flow of
that disk of light that embosoms and illumines his birth-
place in England.

What is true of Straiford-upon-Avon, is equally true
of Abbotsford, of the birth-place of Milton, Burns,
Bunyan, Baxter, and other great mind*, which have
shone each like a sun or star in its sphere. Xow what
one word, recognised as legitimate in scientific termin-
ology, would describe fully one of these disks of light
cast by a human life upon a certain space of earth, not
as a fugitive flash, but as a permanent illumination ?
Photograph would not do it, because its meaning is

102 A Walk from

fixed and rigidly technical, as simple light- writing, or
sun-writing. The term is completely pre-occupied by
this signification, and you cannot inject the human life-
element into it. Biography is universally limited to an
operation in which the life is the subject, not the agent.
It is simply the writing out of a life's history by some
one with a common goosequill or steel pen. Still, the
word biograph would be the best, of the same length,
that we could form to describe one of these disks of light,
if it were made the same verb active as photograph; or to
mean that the life is the agent, as well as the subject,
that it writes itself in light upon a certain locality, just
as the sun graves a human face upon glass. Let us then
call the bright and quenchless planispheres, which such
lives describe and fill around them, biographs, assuming
that the script is in rays of light. As differ the stars
above in glory, so these differ in the qualities of their
illumination. The brightest of them, to mere human
seeming, are those which shine with the sheer brilliancy
of intellect and genius. These chiefly halo the homes
of " the grand old masters " of poetry, painting, elo-
quence and martial glory. These attract to their disks
pilgrims the most numerous and enthusiastic. But,
as the nearest stars are brightest, not largest, so these
biographs are brightest on their earth-side. There are
thousands of less sharp and spangling lustre to the

London to John O 1 Groat's. 103

eyes of the multitude, which shine with tenfold more
brilliancy from their eternity-face. These are they that
halo the homes of good men, whose great hearts drank
in the life of Grod's love in perpetual streams, and
distilled it like a luminous dew around them ; men
whose thoughts were not mere scintillations of genius,
but living labors of beneficence, bearing the proof as
well as promise of that immortality guaranteed to the
deeds of earth's saints. If the soul, after such long
isolation, is to take again to its embrace so much of the
old human corporeity it wore here below, does it trans-
cend the prerogative of hope in the great resurrection
to believe, that these biographs of (rod's loving children
on earth shall be taken up whole into the same immor-
tality as the bodies in which they worked His will
among men? Is the faith too fanciful or irreverent
that believes, that the corridors and inner temples of
Heaven's Glory will be hung with these biographs of
His servants surrounding, like stars, the light-flood of
His love that radiated from His cross on earth ? Is it
too presumptuous to think and say, that such pictures
will be as precious in His sight as any graven by the
lives of angels on their outward or homeward flights of
duty and delight? These are they, therefore, that
shall give to the earth all the immortality to which it
shall attain. These are they that shall take up into the

104 A Walk from

brilliant existence of the hereafter, ten thousand sections
of its corporeity; portions of its surface, perhaps, as
substantial as the human forms that the souls of men
shall wear in another world. These are they that shall
shine as the stars, when those beaming so brilliantly in
our eyes around the shrines of mere intellect and
genius, shall have " paled their ineffectual fires " before
the eflux of diviner light. Let him, then, of thoughtful
and attentive faculties think on these great and holy
possibilities, when he treads within the pale of a good
man's life, whose labors for human happiness " follow
him" according to divine promise; not out of the
world, not down into the grave with his resting body,
but out among living generations, breathing upon them
and through them a blessed and everlasting influence.
Let him tread that disk of light reverentially, for it
is the holiest place on the earth's surface outside the
immediate circumference of Calvary.

This is Babraham ; and here lived Jonas Webb ; a
good man and true, whose influence and usefulness had
a broader circumference than the widest empire in the
world. A Frenchman has written the fullest history of
both, and an American here offers reverentially a tribute
to his worth. The light of his life was a soft and gentle
illumination on its earth-side ; the lustre of the other
was revealed only by partial glimpses to those who

London to John O 'Groat's. 105

leaned closest to him in the testing-moments of his
higher nature. He was one of the great benefactors,
whose lives and labors become the common inheritance
of mankind, and whose names go down through long
generations with a pleasant memory. To a certain
extent, he was to the great primeval industry of the
world what Arkwright, Watts, Stephenson, Fulton and
Morse were each to the mechanical and scientific
activities of the age. He did as much, perhaps, as
any man that ever preceded him, to honor that
industry, and lift it up to the level of the first
occupations of modern times, which had claimed
higher qualities of intelligence, genius and enterprize.
He was a farmer, and his ancestors had been farmers
from time immemorial. He did not bound into the
occupation as an enthusiastic amateur, who had
acquired a large fortune by manufacturing or com-
mercial enterprize, which he was eager to lavish upon
bold and uncertain experiments. He attained his
highest eminence by the careful gradations of a con-
tinuous experience, reaching back far into the labors
of his ancestors. The science, skill and judgment he
brought to bear upon his operations, came from his
reading, thinking, observations and experiments as a
practical and hereditary farmer. The capital he
employed in expanding these operations to their cul-

io6 A Walk from

minating magnitude, he acquired by farming. The
mental culture, the generous dispositions, the refined
manners, the graceful and manly bearing which made
him one of the first gentlemen of the age, he acquired
as a farmer. The mansion which welcomed to its easy
and large-hearted hospitalities guests of such distinction
from his own and other countries, was a farmer's home,
and few ever opened their doors to more urbanity and
cordial cheer. This is an aspect of his character which
all those who follow the profession he honored should
admire with a laudable esprit de corps.

As a back-ground is an important element in the
portraiture of human forms or natural scenery, so the
ground on which the life and labors of Jonas Webb
should be sketched, merits a few preliminary lines. Of
all the occupations that employ and sustain the toiling
myriads of our race, agriculture leans closest to the
bosom of Divine Providence. It is an industry bound
to the great and beautiful economies of the creation by
more visible and sensible ties than any other worked by
human hands. We will not here diverge to dwell upon
these high and interesting affiliations. In their place
we will give them a little extended thought. There is
one feature of agricultural enterprize, however, that
should not be overlooked in this connection. All its
operations are above-board and open to the wide world,

London to John O 1 Groat's. 107

just like the fields to which they are applied. Nothing
here is under lock and key. Nothing bears the grim
warning over the bolted door, " No admittance here
except on business!" meaning by business, exclusively
and sharply, the buying of certain wares of the establish-
ment at a good round profit to the manufacturer, without
carrying away a single scintillation or suggestion of
his skill. If he has invented or adopted machinery or
a process of labor which enables him to turn out cheap
muslin at three farthing's less cost per yard than his
neighbors can make it, seal up the secret from them
with the keenest vigilance. Not so in the great
and heaven-honored industry of agriculture. Its
experiments and improvements upon the earth's face
are all put into the common stock of human knowledge
and happiness. They can no more be placed under lock
and key as selfish secrets, than the stars themselves that
look down upon them with all their golden eyes. No
new implement of husbandry, no new mechanical force
or chemical principle, no new process of labor or line
of economy is withheld from the great commonwealth
of mankind. As the broad skies above, as the sun and
moon, and stars, as the winds, the rains, the dews, the
birds and bees of heaven over-ride and ignore, in their
missions, the boundaries of jealous nations, so all the
great activities of agriculture prove their lineage by

io8 A Walk from

following the same generous rule. They are bounded
by no nationalities. They are shut up in no narrow
enclosure of self, but are put out as new vesicles of light
to brighten the general illumination of the world.

The department in which Jonas Webb attained to
his position and capacity of usefulness was peculiarly
marked by this characteristic. In a certain sense, it
occupied a higher range of interest than that section of
agriculture which is connected solely with the growing
of grain, grass and other crops. His great and
distinguishing husbandry was the cultivation of animal
life. To make two spires of grass grow where only one
grew before, has been pronounced as a great benefaction;
and greater still are the merit and the gain of making
one grow where nothing grew before. To go into the
midst of Dartmoor, and turn an acre of its cold, stony,
water-soaked waste into a fruitful field of golden grain,
is going into co-partnership with Providence in the
work of creation to a very large and honored degree.
But to put the skilful hand of science upon creatures of
flesh and blood, to reform their physical structures and
shapes, to add new inches to their stature, straighten
their backs, expand their reins, amplify their chests,
reduce all the lines and curves of their forms to an
unborn symmetry, and then to give silky softness and
texture to their aboriginal clothing this seems to be

London to John C? Groat's. 109

mounting one step higher in the attainment and dignity
of creative faculties. And this pre-eminently was the
department in which Jonas Webb acquired a distinction
perhaps unparalleled to the present time. This has
made his name familiar all over Christendom, and
honored among the world's benefactors. Never, before
him, did a farm-stead become such a centre and have
such a wide-sweeping radius as his. None ever
possessed such centripetal attractions, or exerted such
centrifugal influences for the material well-being of
different and distant countries. Indeed, those most
remote are most specially indebted to his large and
generous operations. America and Australia will ever
owe his memory an everlasting homage.

His operations filled and crowned two great depart-
ments of improvement seldom, if ever, carried on simul-
taneously and evenly to a great success by one man.
His first distinguishing speciality was sheep-culture.
When he had brought this to the highest standard
of perfection ever attained, he devoted the surplus
capital of skill, experience and pecuniary means he had
acquired from the process to the breeding of cattle;
and he became nearly as eminent in this field of improve-
ment as in the other. A few facts may serve as an out-
line of his progress in both to the American reader who
is familiar with the general result of his efforts.

i io A Walk from

Jonas Webb was born at Great Thurlow, Suffolk, on
the 10th of November, 1796. His father, who died at
the age of ninety-three, was a veteran in agriculture,
and had attained to honorable distinction by his efforts
to improve the old Norfolk breed of sheep, and by his
experiments with other races. The results obtained
from these operations convinced his son that more
mutton and better wool could be made per acre from
the Southdown than from any other breed, upon nine-
tenths of the arable land of England, where the sheep
are regularly folded, especially where the land is poor.
In 1822, he commenced that agricultural career which
won for him such a world- wide celebrity, by taking the
Babraham Farm, occupying about 1000 acres, some
twelve miles south of Cambridge. In a very interesting
letter, addressed to the Farmers' Magazine, about twenty
years since, he gives a valuable resume of his experience
up to that time. In this he states several facts that
may be especially useful to American agriculturists.
Having decided in his own mind that the Southdowns
were preferable to every other breed, for the two
properties mentioned, he went into Sussex, their native
county, and purchased the best rams and ewes that
could be obtained of the principal breeders, regardless
of expense, and never made a cross from any other
breed afterwards. Nor was this all ; he never intro-

London to John O' Groafs. 1 1 1

duced new blood into his stock from flocks of the same
breed, but, by a virtually in-and-in process, he was able
to produce qualities till then unknown to the race, and
to make them permanent and distinctive properties.
Now this achievement in itself has an interest beyond
its utilitarian value to the agriculture world. To

" Rejoice in the joy of well-created things "
is one of the best privileges and pleasures of a well-
constituted mind. But what higher honor can attach
to human science or industry than that of taking such
a visible and effective part in that creation ? in sending
out into the world successive generations of animal life,
bearing each, through future ages and distant countries,
the shaping impress of human fingers long since gone
back to their dust; features, forms, lines, curves,
qualities and characteristics which those fingers, working
as it were, on the right wrist of Divine Providence,
gave to the sheep and cattle upon a thousand hills, in
both hemispheres ? There are flocks and herds now
grazing upon the boundless prairies of America, the
vast plains of Australia, the steppes of Russia, as well
as on the smaller and greener pastures of England,
France and Germany, that bear these finger-marks of
Jonas Webb, as mindless but everlasting memories to
his worth. If the owners of these "well-created things"
value the joy and profit which they thus derive from

ii2 A Walk from

his long and laborious years of devotion to their
interests, let them see that these finger-prints of his
be not obliterated by their neglect, but be perpetuated
for ever, both for their own good and for an ever-living
memorial to his name.

It is a fact of instructive suggestion, that although
Mr. Webb commenced his operations in 1822, he won
his first prize for stock ewes at the meeting of the
Royal Agricultural Society at Cambridge in 1840.
Here he realised one of the serious disadvantages to
which stock-breeders in England are exposed, in
" showing " sheep, cattle or swine at these annual
exhibitions. The great outside world, with tastes that
lean more to fat surloins or shoulders than to the
better symmetries of animated nature, almost de-
mands that every one of these unfortunate beasts
should be offered up as a bloated, blowing sacrifice to
those great twin idols of fleshy lust, Tallow and Lard.
If, therefore, a stock-raiser has not decided to drive his
Shorthorn cow or Southdown ewe immediately from
the Fair grounds to the butcher's shambles, he runs
an imminent risk of losing entirely the use and value
of the animal. So great is this risk, that much of the
stock which would be most useful for exhibition is
withheld, and can only be seen by visiting private
establishments scattered over the kingdom. They are

London to John O' Croat's. 113

too valuable to run the terrible gauntlet of oil-cake,
bean and barley-meal, through which they must
flounder on in cruel obesity to the prize. Especially
is this the case with breeding animals. Mr. Webb's
experience at his first trial of the process, will illustrate
its tendencies and results. Of the nine shearling ewes
he " fed " for the Cambridge Show, he lost four, and
only raised two or three lambs from the rest. At the
Exhibition of 1841, at Liverpool, he won three out
of four of the prizes offered by the Royal Agricultural
Society for Southdowns, or any other short-wooled
sheep ; two out of four offered at Bristol, in 1842, and
three out of four at Derby, in 1843. But here again
he over-fed two of his best sheep, under the inexorable
rule of fat, which exercises such despotic sway over
these annual competitions, and was obliged to kill
them before the show. It will suffice to show the loss
he incurred by this costly homage to Tallow, to give
his own words on the subject : " I had refused 180
guineas for the hire of the two sheep for the season,
I also quite destroyed the usefulness of two other aged
sheep by over-feeding them last year. Neither of
them propogated through the season, and I have had
each of them killed in consequence, which has so
completely tired me of over-feeding that I never intend
exhibiting another aged ram, unless I greatly alter my

ii4 A Walk from

mind, or can find out some method of feeding them
which will not destroy the animals, and which I have
hitherto failed to accomplish." The conclusion which
he adopted, in view of these liabilities, may he useful
to agriculturists in America as well as in England.
He says : " What I intend exhibiting in future will
be shearlings only, as I believe they are not so easily
injured by extra feeding as aged sheep, partly by
being more active, and partly by having more time
to put on their extra condition, by which their consti-
tutions are not likely to be so much impaired."

At nearly every subsequent national exhibition, Mr.
Webb carried off the best prizes for Southdowns. At
Dundee, in 1843, the Highland Society paid him the
compliment of having the likenesses of his sheep taken
for its museum in Edinburgh. He only received two
checks in these competitions after 1840, and these he
rectified and overcame in an interesting way. The
first took place at the great meeting at Exeter, in
1850, and the second at Chelmsford, in 1856. On
both of these occasions, he was convinced that the
judges had not done justice to the qualities of his
animals, and he resolved to submit their judgment to
a court of errors, or to the decision of a subsequent
meeting of the society. So, in 1851, he presented the
unsuccessful candidate at Exeter to the meeting at

London to John O 1 Groat's. 115

Windsor, and took the first prize for it. This fully
reversed the Exeter verdict. He resorted to the same
tribunal to set him right in regard to his apparent
defeat at Chelmsford, in 1856. Next year he presented
the ram beaten there to the Salisbury meeting, and
another jury gave the animal the highest meed of merit.
It was at the zenith of his fame as a sheep-breeder
that Mr. Webb " assisted," as the French say, at the
Universal Exposition at Paris, in 1855. Here his
beautiful animals excited the liveliest admiration. The
Emperor came himself to examine them, and expressed
himself highly pleased at their splendid qualities. It
was on this occasion that Mr. Webb presented to the
Emperor his prize ram, for which, probably, he had
refused the largest sum ever offered for a single
animal of the same race, or 500 guineas ($2,500)
The Emperor accepted the noble present, fully appre-
ciating the spirit in which it was offered, and some time
afterwards sent the generous breeder a magnificent
candelabra, of solid silver, representing a grand old
English oak, with a group of horses shading them-
selves under its branches. This splendid token of the
Emperor's regard is only one of the numerous trophies
and souvenirs that embellish the farmer's home at
Babraham, and which his children and remoter pos-
terity will treasure as precious heir-looms,
i 2

1 1 6 A Walk from

If Mr. Webb did not originate, he developed a
system of usefulness into a permanent and most valu-
able institution, which, perhaps, will be the most novel
to American stock-raisers. Having, by a long course
of scientific observations and experiments, fixed the
qualities he desired to give his Southdowns; having
brought them to the highest perfection, he now adopted
a system which would most widely and cheaply diffuse
the race thus cultivated all over the civilized world.
He instituted an annual ram-letting, which took place
in the month of July. This occasion constituted an
important event to the great agricultural world. A
few Americans have been present and witnessed the
proceedings of these memorable days, and they know
the interest attaching to them better than can be
inferred from any description. M. De La Trehonnais,
in the "Revue Agricole de 1'Angleterre," thus sketches
some of the incidents and aspects of the occasion :

" It is a proceeding regarded in England as a public
event, and all the journals give an account of it with
exact care, assembling from every county and even
from foreign countries. The sale begins about two
o'clock. A circle is formed with ropes in a small
field near the mansion, where the rams are introduced,
and an auctioneer announces the biddings, which are
frequently very spirited. The rams to be let are

London to John O 1 Groat's. 117

exposed around the field from the first of the morning,
and a ticket at the head of each pen indicates the
weight of the fleece of the animal it contains. Every
one takes his notes, chooses the animal he approves of,
and can demand the last bidding when he pleases.
The evening after the letting, the numerous company
assemble under a rustic shed, ornamented with leaves
and agricultural devices. There tables are laid, around
which are placed two or three hundred guests, and
then commences one of those antique repasts described
by Homer or Eabelais. The tables groan under the
weight of enormous pieces of beef, gigantic hams, &c.,
which have almost disappeared before the commence-
ment of the sale. From eight in the morning until
two in the afternoon, tables laid out in the dining-
room and hall are furnished, only to be refurnished
immediately, the end being equal to the beginning."

This description refers to the thirty-second letting.
Mr. Webb's flock then consisted of seven hundred
breeding ewes, a proportionate number of lambs, and
about four hundred rams of different ages. It was
from these rams that the animals were selected which
were sent into Qvery country in the civilized world.
The average price of their lettings was nearly 24 each,
although some of the rams brought the sum of 180, or
nearly nine hundred dollars! What would some of the

1 1 8 A Walk from

old-fashioned farmers of New England, of forty years
ago, think of paying nearly a thousand dollars for the
rent of a ram for a single year, or even one tenth of
that sum ? But this rentage was not a fancy price.
The farmer who paid it got back his money many
times over in the course of a few years. From this
infusion of the Babraham blood into his flock, he
realised an augmented production of mutton and wool
annually per acre which he could count definitely by
pounds. The verdict of his balance-sheet proved the
profit of the investment. It would be impossible to
measure the benefit which the whole world reaped
from Mr. Webb's labors in this department of useful-
ness. An eminent authority has stated that "it would
be difficult, if not impossible, to find a Southdown
flock of any reputation, in any country in the world,
not closely allied with the Babraham flock." It is a
fact that illustrates the skill and care, as well as
demonstrates the value of his system of improvement,
that, after thirty-seven years as a breeder, the tribes
he founded maintained to the last those distinguishing
qualities which gave them such pre-eminence over all
other sheep bearing the general name of the Sussex
race. So valuable and distinctive were those qualities
regarded by the best judges in the country, that
the twelfth ram-letting, which took place at the time

London to John O' Groat's. 119

of the Cambridge Show, brought together 2,000 visitors,
constituting, perhaps, the most distinguished assembly
of agriculturists ever convened. On this occasion the
Duke of Richmond, an hereditary and eminent breeder
of Southdowns in their native county, bid 100 guineas
for a ram lamb, which Mr. Webb himself bought in.

Having attained to such eminence as a sheep-
breeder, Mr. Webb entered upon another sphere of
improvement, in which he won almost equal distinction.
In 1837, he laid the foundation of the Babraham Herd
of Shorthorn cattle, made up of six different tribes,
purchased from the most valuable and celebrated
branches of the race bearing that name. An incident
attaching to one of these purchases may illustrate the
nice care and cultivated skill which Mr. Webb exer-
cised in the treatment of choice animals. He bought
out of Lord Spencer's herd the celebrated cow,
" Dodona." That eminent breeder, it appears, had
given her up, as irretrievably sterile, and he parted
with her solely on that account. Mr. Webb, however,
took her to Babraham, and, as a result of the more
intelligent treatment he bestowed upon her, she pro-
duced successively four calves, which thus formed
one of the most valuable families of the Babraham
herd. When I visited the scene of his life and
labors, all his sheep and cattle had been sold. But

I2O A Walk from

two or three animals bought by an Australian gentle-
man were still in the keeping of Mr. Webb's son,
awaiting arrangements for their transportation. One
of these, a beautiful heifer of 14 months, was purchased
at the winding-up sale, for 225 guineas. It was called,
the " Drawing-room Eose," from this circumstance, as
I afterwards learned. When it was first dropped by
the dam, Mr. Webb was confined to the house by indis-
position. But he had such a desire to see this new
accession to his bovine family, that he directed it to
be brought into the drawing-room for that purpose.
Hence it received a more elegant and domestic
appellation than the variegated nomenclature of high-
blooded animals often allows.

When the last volume of the " English Herd-Book "
was about to be published, Mr. Webb sent for insertion a
list of sixty-one cows, with their products. He generally
kept from twenty to thirty bulls in his stalls.

Nor were his labors confined even to the two great
spheres of enterprise with which his name has been
intimately and honorably associated. If it was the
great aim of his intelligent activities to produce stock
which should yield the most meat to the acre, he also
gave great attention to the augmented production
of the land itself. He was the principal originator
and promoter of the great Agricultural Hall, in

London to John O Groat's. 121

London, for the exhibition of the fat stock for the
Smithfield Show. This may be called the Crystal
Palace of the animal world. It is the grandest
structure ever erected for the exhibition of cattle,
sheep, swine, poultry &c. I will essay no description
of it here, but it will carry through long generations
the name and memory of Jonas Webb of Babraham.
He was chairman of the company that built the
superb edifice ; also president of the Nitro-phosphate
or Blood-manure Company, a fertilizer in which he
had the greatest confidence, and which he used in
great quantities upon the large farm he cultivated,
containing over 2000 acres.

At the age of nearly sixty-six, Mr. Webb found
that his health would no longer stand the strain of
the toil, care and anxiety requisite to keep np the
Babraham , flock to the high standard of perfection
which it had attained. So, after nearly forty years
of devotion to this great occupation of his life, he
concluded to retire from it altogether, dispersing his
sheep and cattle as widely as purchasers might be
found. This breaking-up took place at Babraham on
the 10th of July, 1862. Then and there the long
series of annual re-unions terminated for ever. The
occasion had a mournful interest to many who had
attended those meetings from year to year. It seemed

122 A Walk from

like the voluntary and unexpected abdication of an
Alexander, still able to add to his conquests and
trophies. All present felt this; and several tried to
express it at the old table now spread for the last
time for such guests. But his inherent and invincible
modesty waived aside or intercepted the compliments
that came from so many lips. With a kind of
ingenious delicacy, which one of the finest of human
sentiments could only inspire, he contrived to divert
attention or reference to himself and his life's labors.
But he could not make the company forget them,
even if he gently checked allusion to them.

The company on this interesting occasion was very
large, about 1000 persons having sat down to the
collation. Not only were the principal nobility and
gentry of Great Britain interested in agricultural
pursuits present in large number, but the representa-
tives of nearly every other country in Christendom.
Several gentlemen from the United States were among
the purchasers. The total number of sheep sold was
969, which fetched under the hammer the great aggre-
gate of 10,926, or more than 54,000 dollars. The
most splendid ram in the flock went to the United
States, being knocked down to Mr. J. C. Taylor, of
Holmdale, New Jersey ; who is doing so much to
Americanise the Southdowns. Others went to the

. London to John O* Groat's.

12

Canadas, Australia, South America, and to nearly
every country in continental Europe.

Thus was formed, and thus was dispersed the famous
Babraham flock. And such were the labors of Jonas
Webb for the material well-being of mankind. These
alone, detached from those qualities and characteristics
which make up and reflect a higher nature, entitle
his name to a wide and lasting memory among men.
And these labors and successes are they that those
who have read of them in different countries know
him by. These comprise and present the character
they honor with respect. What he was in the temper
and disposition of his inner life, in daily walk and
conversation, in the even and gentle amenities of
Christian humility, in sudden trials of his faith and
patience ; what he was as a husband, father, friend
and neighbor, to the poor, to the afflicted in mind,
body or estate, all this will remain unwritten, but
not unremembered by those who breathed and moved
within that disk of light which his life shed around him.

Few men have lived in whom so many personal and
moral qualities combined to command respect, esteem,
and even admiration. In stature, countenance, ex-
pression, and deportment, he was a noble specimen of
fully developed English manhood. To this first, ex-
ternal aspect, his kindly and generous dispositions, his

124 A Walk from

genial manners, his delicate but dignified modesty, his
large intelligence and large-heartedness, gave the addi-
tional and crowning characteristic of a Christian gentle-
man. Many Americans have visited Babraham, and
enjoyed the hospitalities' which such a host could only
give and grace. They will remember the paintings
hung around the walls of that drawing-room, in which
his commanding form, in the strength and beauty of
meridian life, towers up in the rural landscape, sur-
rounded by cattle and sheep bearing the impress of his
skill and care. A little incident occurred a few years
ago, which may illustrate this personal aspect better
than any simile of description. On the occasion of one
of the great Agricultural Expositions in Paris, a depu-
tation or a company of gentlemen went over to repre-
sent the Agricultural Society of England. Mr. Webb
was one of the number; and some French nobleman
who had known him personally, as well as by reputa-
tion, was very desirous of making him a guest while in
Paris. To be sure of this pleasure, he sent a special
courier all the way to Folkestone, charged with a letter
which he was himself to put into the hands of Mr.
"Webb, before the steamer left the dock. "But how
am I to know the gentleman?" asked the courier;
"I never saw him in my life." " N'importe" was
the reply. " Put the letter in the hand of the noblest-

London to John O Groat's. 125

looking man on board, and you will be sure to be
right." The courier followed the direction ; and, sta-
tioning himself near the gangway, he took his master's
measure of every passenger as he entered. He could
not be mistaken. As soon as the plank was withdrawn,
he approached Mr. Webb, hat in hand, and, with a
deferential word of recognition, done in the best grace
of French politeness, handed him the letter. One of
the deputation, noticing the incident, and wondering
how the man knew whom he was addressing without
previous inquiry, questioned him afterwards on the
subject, and learned from him the ground on which he
proceeded. The photographic likeness presented in
connection with this notice was taken shortly before his
decease, at the age of nearly 66, and when his health
was greatly impaired.

Few men ever carried out so fully the injunction, not
to let the left hand know what the right hand did, in
the quiet and steady outflow of good will and good
works, as Mr. Webb. Even those nearest and dearest
to him never knew what that right hand did as a help
in time of need, what that large heart felt in time of
others' affliction, what those lips said to the sorrowing,
in tearful moments of grief, until they had been stilled
for ever on earth. Then it came out, act by act, word
by word, thought by thought, from those who held the

126 A Walk from

remembrances in their souls as precious souvenirs of a
good man's life. So earnest was his desire to do these
things in secret, that his own family heard of them
only by accident, and from those whom he so greatly
helped with his kindness and generosity. And when
known by his wife and children, in this way, they were
put under the ban of secrecy. This it is that makes
it so difficult to delineate the home and heaven side of
his character. Those nearest to him, who breathed in
the blessing of its daily odor, so revere his repeated and
earnest wish not to have his good works talked of in
public, that, even now he is dead and gone, they hold
it as a sacred obligation to his memory not to give up
these treasured secrets of his life. Thus, in giving a
partial coup d'ceil of that aspect of his character which
fronted homeward and heavenward, one can only glean,
here and there, glimpses of different traits, in acts,
incidents, and anecdotes remembered by neighbors
and friends near and remote. Were it not that his
children are withheld, by this delicate veneration, from
giving to the public facts known to them alone, the
moral beauty and brightness of his life would shine out
upon the world with warmer rays and larger rayons.
I hope that a single passage from a letter written by
one of them to a friend, even under the injunction of
confidence, may be given here, without rending the veil

London to John O* Groat's. 127

which they hold so sacred. In referring to this dispo-
sition and habit of her venerated father, she says :

" Often have I been so blessed as to be caused to shed
tears of joy and pride at hearing proofs of his tender-
ness, kindness, and generosity related by the recipients
of some token of his nobleness, but of which we never
should have heard from himself."

A little incident may illustrate this trait of his dis-
position. In 1862, a " Loan Court " was held in Lon-
don, at which there was a most magnificent display of
jewels and plate of all kinds, contributed by their owners
to be exhibited for the gratification of the public. A
friend, who held him in the highest veneration, return-
ing from this brilliant show, expressed regret that Mr.
Webb had not furnished one of the stands, by sending
the splendid silver candelabra presented to Tivm by the
French Emperor, with the many silver cups and medals
he had won. Mr. Webb replied, that the mercies God
had blessed him with, and the successes He had awarded
to him, might have been sent to teach him humility,
and not given to parade before the world.

It is one of the most striking proofs of his great and
pure-heartedness, that, notwithstanding nearly forty
consecutive years of vigorous and successful competi-
tion with the leading agriculturists of Great Britain
and other countries, none of the victories he won over

128 A Walk from

them, or the eminence he attained, ever made him an
enemy. When we consider the eager ambitions and
excited sensibilities that enter into these competitions,
this fact in itself shows what manner of man he was
in his disposition and deportment. Referring to this
aspect of his character, the French writer, already cited,
M. De La Trehonnais, says of him, while still living :

" There exists no person who has gained the esteem
and goodwill of his cotemporaries to a higher degree
than Mr. Webb. His probity, his scrupulous good
faith, his generosity, and the affable equality of his
character, have gained for him the respect and affection
of every one. Since I have had the honor of knowing
him, which is already many years, I have never known
of his having a single enemy ; and in my constant
intercourse with the agricultural classes of England, I
have never heard of a single malevolent insinuation
respecting him. When we consider how much those
who raise themselves in the world above others, are
made the butt for the attacks of envy in proportion
with their elevation, we may conclude that there are
in the character of this wealthy man very solid virtues,
well fixed principles, transcendant merit, to have passed
through his long career of success and triumphs with-
out having drawn upon himself the ill-will of a single
enemy, or the calumnious shaft of envy."

London to John O' Groat's. 129

Nor were these negative virtues, ending where they
begun, or enabling him to go through a long life of
energetic activities without an enemy. He not only
lived at peace with all men, but he did his utmost to
make them live at peace with each other. Says one
who knew him intimately : "I never heard him express
a sentiment savoring of enmity to any person, nor could
he bear to see it entertained by any one towards another.
Even if he heard of an ill feeling existing between
persons, he would, if possible, effect a reconciliation ;
and his own bright example, and hearty, kind, genial
manners, always warmed all hearts towards himself.
Notwithstanding the numerous calls upon his time,
made by public and private business, he did not lose
his sweet cheerfulness of temper, and was ever ready
in his most busy moments to aid others, if he saw a
possibility of so doing." Energy, gentleness, conscien-
tiousness, and courtesy were seldom, if ever, blended in
such suave accord as in him. These virtues came out,
each in its distinctive lustre, under the trials and vexa-
tions which try human' nature most severely. All who
knew him marvelled that he was able to maintain such
sweetness and evenness of temper under provocations and
difficulties which would have greatly annoyed most
men. What he was in these outer circles of his in-
fluence, he was, to all the centralisation of his virtues,

1 30 A Walk from

in the heart of his family. Here, indeed, the best
graces of his character had their full play and beauty.
He was the centre and soul of one of the happiest of
earthly homes, attracting to him the affections of every
member of the hearth circle that moved in the sleepless
light of his life. Here he did not rule, but led by love.
It alone dictated, and it alone obeyed. It inspired its
like in domestic discipline. Spontaneous reverence for
such a father's wish and will superseded the unpleasant
necessity of more active parental constraint. To bring
a shade of sadness to that venerated face, or a speech-
less reproach to that benignant eye, was a greater
punishment to a temporarily wayward child than any
corporal correction could have inflicted.

No one of the hundreds that were present at the
sale and dispersion of the Babraham flock could have
thought that the remaining days of the great and good
man were to be so few on earth. He was then about
sixty-five years of age, of stately, unbending form and
face radiant and genial with the florid flush of that
Indian Summer which so many Englishmen wear late
in those autumnal years that bend and pale American
forms and faces to "the sere and yellow leaf" of life.
But the sequel proved that he did not abdicate his
position too early. In a little more than a year from
this event, his spirit was raised to higher fellowships

London to John O 1 Groat's. 131

and folded with those of the pure and blest of bygone
ages. The incidents and coincidents of the last, great
moments of his being here, were remarkable and
affecting. Neither he nor his wife died at the home
they had made so happy with the beauty and savor
of their virtues. Under another and a distant roof
they both laid themselves down to die. The husband's
hand was linked in his wife's, up to within a few short
steps of the river's brink, when, touched with the cold
spray of the dark waters, it fell from its hold and was
superseded by the strong arm of the angel of the
covenant, sent to bear her first across the flood. In
life they were united to a oneness seldom witnessed
on earth ; in death they were not separated except by
the thinnest partition. Though her spirit was taken
up first to the great and holy communion above, the
ministering angel of God's love let her body remain
with him as a pledge until his own spirit was called to
join hers in the joint mansion of their eternal rest.
On the very day that her body was carried to its long
home, his own unloosed, to its upward flight, the soul
that had made it shine for half a century like a temple
erected to the Divine Glory. The years allotted to
him on earth were even to a day. Just sixty-six were
measured off to him, and then "the wheel ceased to
turn at the cistern," and he died on his birthday.

K2

132 A Walk from

An affecting coincidence also marked the departure of
his beloved wife. She left on the birthday of her
eldest son, who had intended to make the anniversary
the dating-day of domestic happiness, by choosing it
for his marriage.

A few facts will suffice for the history of the closing
scene. About the middle of October, 1862, Mrs. Webb,
whose health seemed failing, went to visit her brother,
Henry Marshall, Esq., residing in Cambridge. Here
she suddenly became much worse, and the prospect of
her recovery more and more doubtful. Mr. Webb was
with her immediately on the first unfavorable turn of
her illness, together with other members of the family.
When he realised her danger, and the hope of her
surviving broke down with him, his physical constitu-
tion succumbed under the impending blow, and two
days before her death, he was prostrated by a nervous
fever, from which he never rallied, but died on the 10th
of November. Although the great visitation was too
heavy for his flesh and blood to bear, his spirit was
strengthened to drink this last cup of earthly trial
with beautiful serenity and submission. It was strong
enough to make his quivering lips to say, in distinct
and audible utterance, and his closing eyes to pledge
the truth and depth of the sentiment, " Thy will be
done ! " One who stood over him in these last

London to John O Groat's. 133

moments says, that, when assured of his own danger,
his countenance only seemed to take on a light of
greater happiness. He was conscious up to within a
few minutes of his death, and, though unable to speak
articulately, responded by expressions of his coun-
tenance to the words and looks of aifection addressed
to him by the dear ones surrounding his bed. One of
them read to him a favorite hymn, beginning with,
" Cling to the Comforter ! " When she ceased, he
signed to her to repeat it ; and, while the words were
still on her lips, the Comforter came at his call, and
bore his waiting spirit away to the heavenly com-
panionship for which it longed. As it left the stilled
temple of its earthly habitation, it shed upon the deli-
cately carved lines of its marble door and closed win-
dows a sweet gleam of the morning twilight of its own
happy immortality.

A long funeral cortege attended the remains of the
deceased from Cambridge to their last resting place in
the little village churchyard of Babraham. Beside
friends from neighboring villages, the First Cambridge-
shire Mounted Eifle Corps joined the procession, to-
gether with a large number of the county police force.
His body was laid down to its last, long rest beside
that of his wife, who preceded him to the tomb only a
few days. Though Stratford-upon-Avou, and Dryburgh

134 A Walk from

Abbey may attract more American travellers to their
shrines, I am sure many of them, with due perception
of moral worth, will visit Babraham, and hold it in
reverent estimation as the home of one of the world's
best worthies, who left on it a biograph which shall
have a place among the human-life-scapes which the
Saviour of mankind shall hang up in the inner temple
of His Father's glory, as the most precious tokens and
trophies of the earth, on which he shared the tearful
experiences of humanity, and bore back to His throne
all the touching memories of its weaknesses, griefs, and
sorrows.

A movement is now on foot to erect a suitable monu-
ment to his memory. It may indicate the public estima-
tion in which his life and labors are held that, already,
about 10,000 have been subscribed towards this testi-
monial to his worth. The monument, doubtless, will
be placed in the great Agricultural Hall, which he did
so much to found. Thus his name will wear down to
coming generations the crystal roofage of that magni-
ficent edifice as a fitting crown of honor.

London to John O 1 Groat's. 135

CHAPTER VIII.

THRESHING MACHINE FLOWER SHOW THE HOLLYHOCK AND ITS SUG-
GESTIONS THE LAW OF CO-OPERATIVE ACTIVITIES IN VEGETABLE,

ANIMAL, MENTAL, AND MORAL LIFE.

" In all places, then, and in all seasons,
Flowers expand their light and soul-like wings,
Teaching us, by most persuasive reasons,
How akin they are to human things."

LONGFELLOW.

M

"Y stay at Babraham was short. It was like a
visit to the grave of one of those English
worthies whose lives and labors are so well known
and appreciated in America. All the external fea-
tures of the establishment were there unchanged. The
large and substantial mansion, with its hall and parlor
walls hung with the mementoes of the genius and
success that had made it so celebrated ; the barns and
housings for the great herds and flocks which had been
dispersed over the world ; the very pens still standing
in which they had been folded in for the auctioneer's
hammer ; all these arrangements and aspects remained
as they were when Jonas Webb left his home to return
no more, But all those beautiful and happy families

136 A Walk from

of animal life, which he reared to such perfection, were
scattered on the wings of wind and steam to the utter-
most and most opposite parts of the earth.

The eldest son, Mr. Samuel Webb, who supervises
part of the farm occupied by his father, and also carries
on one of his own in a neighboring parish, was very
cordial and courteous, and drove me to his establish-
ment near Chesterford. Here a steam threshing machine
was at work, doing prodigious execution on different
kinds of grain. The engine had climbed, a proprii
motu, a long ascent ; had made its way partly through
ploughed land to the rear of the barn, and was ratlingly
busy in a fog of dust, doing the labor of a hundred
flails. Eicks of wheat and beans, each as large as a
comfortable cottage, disappeared in quick succession
through the fingers of the chattering, iron-ribbed giant,
and came out in thick and rapid streams of yellow
grain. Swine seemed to be the speciality to which this
son of Mr. Webb is giving some of that attention which
his father gave to sheep. There were between 200 and
300 in the barn-yards and pens, of different ages and
breeds, all looking in excellent condition.

From Chesterford I went on to Cambridge, where I
remained for the most part of two days, on account of
a heavy fall of rain, which kept me within doors nearly
all the time. I went out, however, for an hour or so

London to John C? Groat's. 137

to see a Flower Show in the Town Hall. The varieties
and specimens made a beautiful, but not very extensive
array. There was one flower that not only attracted
especial admiration, but invited a pleasant train of
thoughts to my own mind. It was one of those old
favorites to which the common people of all countries,
who speak our mother tongue, love to give an inalien-
able English name The Hollyhock. It is one of the
flowers of the people, which the pedantic Latinists have
left untouched in homely Saxon, because the people
would have none of their long-winded and heartless
appellations. After .having dwelt briefly upon the
honor that Divine Providence confers upon human
genius and labor, in letting them impress their finger-
marks so distinctly upon the features and functions of
the earth, and upon the forms of animal life, it may
be a profitable recurrence to the same line of thought
to notice what that same genius and labor have wrought
upon the structure and face of this familiar flower.
What was it at first? What is it now in the rural
gardens of New England ? A shallow, bell-mouthed
cup, in most cases purely white, and hung to a tall,
coarse stalk, like the yellow jets of a mullein. That
is its natural and distinctive characteristic in all coun-
tries ; at least where it is best known and most common.
What is it here, bearing the finger-prints of man's

138 A Walk from

mind and taste upon it? Its white and thin-sided
cup is brim full and running over with flowery exu-
berance of leaf and tint infinitely variegated. Here
it is as solid, as globe-faced, and nearly as large as
the dahlia. Place it side by side with the old, single-
leafed hollyhock, in a New England farmer's garden,
and his wife would not be able to trace any family
relationship between them, even through the spectacles
with which she reads the Bible. But the dahlia itself
what was that in its first estate, in the country in
which it was first found in its aboriginal structure and
complexion ? As plain and unpretending as the holly-
hock ; as thinly dressed as the short-kirtled daisy in a
Connecticut meadow. It is wonderful, and passing
wonder, how teachable and quick of perception and
prehension is Nature in the studio of Art. She, the
oldest of painters, that hung the earth, sea, and sky of
the Antediluvian world with landscapes, waterscapes,
and cloudscapes manifold and beautiful, when as yet
the human hand had never lifted a pencil to imitate
her skill; she, with the colors wherewith she dyed
the fleecy clouds that spread their purple drapery over
the first sunset, and in which she dipped the first rain-
bow hung in heaven, and the first rose that breathed
and blushed on earth ; she that has embellished every
day, since the Sun first opened its eye upon the world,

London to John O 'Groat's. 139

with a new gallery of paintings for every square mile
of land and sea, and new dissolving views for every
hour she, with all these artistic antecedents, tastes,
and faculties, comes modestly into the conservatory of
the floriculturist, and takes lessons of him in shaping
and tinting plants and flowers which the great Master
said were "all very good" on the sixth-day morning
of the creation ! This is marvellous, showing a prero-
gative in human genius almost divine, and worthy of
reverent and grateful admiration. How wide-reaching
and multigerent is 'this prerogative ! In how many
spheres of action it works simultaneously in these latter
days ! See how it manipulates the brute forces of
Nature ! See how it saddles the winds, and bridles and
spurs the lightning ! See how it harnesses steam to the
plough, the flood to the spindle, the quick cross cur-
rents of electricity to the newsman's phaeton ! Then
ascend to higher reaches of its faculty. In the hands
of a Bakewell or a Webb, it gives a new and creative
shaping to multitudinous generations of animal life.
Nature yields to its suggestion and leading, and co-
works, with all her best and busiest activities, to realise
the human ideal ; to put muscle there, to straighten
that vertebra, to parallel more perfectly these dorsal
and ventral lines, to lengthen or shorten those bones ;
to flesh the leg only to such a joint, and wool or

140 A Walk from

unwool it below ; to horn or unborn tbe bead, to
blacken or blancb tbe face, to put on tbe whole body
a new dress and make it and its remote posterity wear
this new form and costume forever more. All this
shows how kindly and almost proudly Nature takes
Art into partnership with her in these new structures
of beauty and perfection ; both teaching and taught,
and wooing man to work with her, and walk with her,
and talk with her within the domain of creative ener-
gies ; to make the cattle and sheep of ten thousand
bills and valleys thank the Lord, out of the grateful
speech of their large, lustrous eyes, for better forms
and features, and faculties of comfort than their early
predecessors were born to.

Equally wonderful, perhaps more beautiful, is the
joint work of Nature and Art on the sweet life and
glory of flowers. However many they were, and what
they were, that breathed upon the first spring or sum-
mer day of time, each was a half-sealed gift of (rod to
man, to be opened by his hand when his mind should
open to a new sense of beauty and perfection. Flowers,
each with a genealogy reaching unbroken through the
Flood back to the overhanging blossoms of Eden, have
come down to us, as it were, only in their travelling
costume, with their best dresses packed away in stamen,
or petal, or private seedcase, to be brought out at the

London to John O' Groat's. 141

end of fifty centuries at the touch of human genius.
Those of which Solomon sang in his time, and which
exceeded his glory in their every-day array, even " the
hyssop by the wall," never showed, on the gala-days of
his Egyptian bride, the hidden charms which he, in
his wisdom, knew not how to unlock. Flowers in-
numerable are now, like illuminated capitals of Nature's
alphabet, flecking, with their sheen-dots, prairie, steppe,
mountain and meadow, the earth around, which, per-
haps, will only give their best beauties to the world in
a distant age. As the light of the latest created and
remotest stars has not yet completed its downward
journey to the eye of man, so to his sight have not
these sweet-breathing constellations of the field yet
made the full revelation of their treasured hues
and forms. Not one in a hundred of them all has
done this up to the present moment. When one in
ten of those that bless us with their life and being
shall put on all its reserved beauty, then, indeed, the
stars above and the stars below will stud the firmaments
in which they shine with equal glory, and blend both
in one great heavenscape for the eye and heart of man.
One by one, in its turn, the key of human genius shall
unlock the hidden wardrobe of the commonest flowers,
and deck them out in the court dress reserved, for five
thousand years, to be worn in the brighter, afternoon

142 A Walk from

centuries of the world. The Mistress of the Eobes is a
high dignitary in the Household of Boyalty, and has
her place near to the person of the Queen. But the
Floriculturist, of educated perception and taste, is the
master of a higher state robe, and holds the key of
embroidered vestments, cosmetics, tintings, artistries,
hair-jewels, head-dresses, brooches, and bracelets, which
no empress ever wore since human crowns were made ;
which Nature herself could not show on all the bygone
birthdays of her being.

This is marvellous. It is an honor to man, put upon
hvm from above, as one of the gratuitous dignities of
his being. " An undevout astronomer is mad," said
one who had opened his mind to a broad grasp of the
wonders which this upper heaven holds in its bosom.
The floriculturist is an astronomer, with Newton's tele-
scope reversed ; and if its revelations do not stir up
holy thoughts in his soul, he is blind as well as mad.
No glass, no geometry that Newton ever lifted at the
still star-worlds above, could do more than reveal. At
the farthest stretch of their faculty, they could only
bring to light the life and immortality of those orbs
which the human eye had never seen before. They
could not tint nor add a ray to one of them all. They
never could bring down to the reach of man's unaided
vision a single star that Noah could not see through

London to John O" Groat's. 143

the deck-lights of the Ark. It was a gift and a glory
that well rewarded the science and genius of Newton
and Herschel, of Adams and Le Verrier, that they
could ladder these mighty perpendicular distances,
and climb the rounds to such heights and sweeps of
observation, and count, measure, and name orbs and
orbits before unknown, and chart the paths of their
rotations, and weigh them, as in scales, while in
motion. But this ^-astronomer, whose observatory
in his conservatory, whose telescope and fluxions are
his trowel and watering-pot, not only brings to
light the hidden life of a thousand earth-stars, but
changes their forms, colors their rays, half creates
and transforms, until each differs as much from its
original structure and tinting as the planet Jupiter
would differ from its familiar countenance if Adams or
Le Verrier could make it wear the florid face of Mars.
This man, and it is to be hoped that he carries some
devout and grateful thoughts to his work sets Nature
new lessons daily in artistry, and she works out the new
ideals of his taste to their joint and equal admiration.
He has got up a new pattern for the fern. She lets
him guide her hand in the delicate operation, and she
crimps, fringes, shades or shapes its leaflets to his will,
even to a thousand varieties. He moistens her fingers
with the fluids she uses on her easel, and puts them to

144 A Walk from

the rootlets of the rose, and they transpose its hues, or
fringe it or tinge it with a new glory. He goes into
the fen or forest, or climbs the jutting crags of lava-
mailed mountains, and brings back to his fold one of
Natures' foundlings, a little, pale-faced orphan, crouch-
ing, pinched and starved, in a ragged hood of dirty
muslin ; and he puts it under the fostering of those
maternal fingers, guided by his own. Soon it feels the
inspiration of a new life warming and swelling its
shrivelled veins. Its paralysed petals unfold, one by
one. The rim of its cup fills, leaf by leaf, to the brim.
It becomes a thing most lovely and fair, and he intro-
duces it, with pride, to the court beauties of his crystal
palace.

The agriculturist is taken into this co-partnership of
Nature in a higher domain of her activities, measured
by the great utilities of human life. We have glanced
at their joint-work in her animal kingdom. In the
vegetable, it is equally wonderful. Nature contributes
the raw material of these great and vital industries,
then incites and works out human suggestions. Thus
she trains and obeys the mind and hand of man, in this
grand sphere of development. Their co-working and
its result are just as perceptible in a common Irish
potato as in the most gorgeous dahlia ever exhibited.
Not one farmer in a thousand has ever read the history

London to John O 1 Groat's. 145

of that root of roots, in value to mankind ; has ever
conceived what a tasteless, contracted, water-soaked
thing it was in its wild and original condition. Let
them read a few chapters of the early history of New
England, and they will see what it was, two hundred
and fifty years ago, when the strong-hearted men and
women, whom Hooker led to the banks of the Connec-
ticut, sought for it in the white woods of winter,
scraping away the snow with their frosted fingers. The
largest they found just equalled the Malaga grape in
size and resembled it in complexion. They called it
the ground-nut, for it seemed akin to the nuts dropped
by the oaks of different names. No flower that breathes
on earth has been made to produce so many varieties of
form, complexion and name as this homely root. It
would be an interesting and instructive enterprise, to
array all the varieties of this queen of esculent vegeta-
bles which Europe and America could exhibit, face to
face with all the varieties which the dahlia, geranium,
panza, or even the fern has produced, and then see
which has been numerically the most prolific in diversi-
fication of forms and features. It should gratify a
better motive than curiosity to trace back the history of
other roots to their aboriginal condition. Types of the
original stock may now be found, in waste places, in
the wild turnip, wild carrot, parsnip, &c. "Line upon

L

146 A Walk from

line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a
little," it may be truly and gratefully said, these roots,

internetted with the very life-fibres of human suste-
nance, have been brought to their present perfection
and value. The great governments and peoples of
the world should give admiring and grateful thought
to this fact. Here nature co-works with the most
common and inartistic of human industries, as they are
generally held, with faculties as subtle and beautiful as
those which she brings to bear upon the choicest flowers.
The same is true of grains and grasses for man and
beast. They come down to us from a kind of heathen
parentage, receiving new forms and qualities from age
to age. The wheats, which make the bread of all the
continents, now exhibit varieties which no one has
undertaken to enumerate. Fruits follow the same rule,
and show the same joint-working of Nature and Art as
in the realm of flowers.

The wheel within wheel, the circle within circle
expand and ascend until the last circumferential line
sweeps around all the world of created being, even
taking in, upon the common radius, the highest and
oldest of the angels. From the primrose peering from
the hedge to the premier seraph wearing the coronet
of his sublime companionship ; from the lowest forms of
vegetable existence to the loftiest reaches of moral

London to John O 'Groat's. 147

nature this side of the Infinite, this everlasting law of
co- working rules the ratio of progress and development.
In all the concentric spheres strung on the radius
measured by these extremes, there is this same co-acting
of internal and external forces. And mind, of man or
angel, guides and governs both. Not a flower that
ever breathed on 'earth, not one that ever blushed in
Eden, could open all its hidden treasures of beauty
without the co-working of man's mind and taste. No
animal that ever bowed its neck to his yoke, or gave
him labor, milk or wool, could come to the full develop-
ment of its latent vitalities and symmetries without the
help of his thought and skill. The same law obtains
in his own physical nature. Mind has made it what
it is to-day, as compared with the wild features and
habits of its aboriginal condition. Mind has worked
for five thousand years upon its fellow-traveller through
time, to fit it more and more fully for the companion-
ship. It was delivered over to her charge naked, with
its attributes and faculties as latent and dormant as
those of the wild rose or dahlia. Through all the ages
long, she has worked upon its development ; educating
its tastes ; taming its appetites ; refining its sensi-
bilities ; multiplying and softening its enjoyments ;
giving to every sense a new capacity and relish of
delight ; cultivating the ear for music, and ravishing it
L 2

148 A Walk from

with the concord of sweet sounds ; cultivating the eye
to drink in the glorious beauty of the external world,
then adding to natural sceneries ten thousand pictures
of mountain, valley, river, man, angel and scenes in
human and heaven's history, painted by the thought-
instructed hand; cultivating the palate to the most
exquisite sensibilities, and exploring all the zones for
luxuries to gratify them ; cultivating the fine finger-
nerves to such perception that they can feel the pulse
of sleeping notes of music; cultivating the still finer
organism that catches the subtle odors on the wing,
and sends their separate or mingled breathings through
every vein and muscle from head to foot.

The same law holds good in the development of
mind. It has now reached such an altitude, and it
shines with such lustre, that our imagination can hardly
find the way down to the morning horizon of its life,
and measure its scope and power in the dim twilight of
its first hours in time. The simple facts of its first
condition would now seem to most men as exaggerated
fancies, if given in the simplest forms of truthful state-
ment. With all the mighty faculties to which it has
come ; with its capacity to count, name, measure and
weigh stars that Adam, nor Moses, nor Solomon ever
saw ; with all the forces of nature it has subdued to the
service of man, it cannot tell what simplest facts of the

London to John O' Groat's. 149

creation had to be ascertained by its first, feeble and
confused reasonings. No one of to-day can say how
low down in the scale of intelligence the human mind
began to exercise its untried faculties ; what apposition
and deduction of thoughts it required to individualise the
commonest objects that met the eye ; even to determine
that the body it animated was not an immovable part
of the earth itself ; to obtain fixed notions of distance,
of color, light and heat ; to learn the properties and
uses of plants, herbs and fruits ; even to see the sun
sink out of sight with the sure faith that it would rise
again. It was gifted with no instinct, to decide these
questions instantly and mechanically. They had all to
pass through the varied processes of reason. The first
bird that sang in Eden, built its first nest as perfectly
as its last. But, thought by thought, the first human
mind worked out conclusions which the dullest beast or
bird reached instantly without reason. What wonder-
ful co- working of internal and external influences was
provided to keep thought in sleepless action ; to open,
one by one, the myriad petals of the mind ! Nature,
with all its shifting sceneries, filled every new scope of
vision with objects that hourly set thought at play in a
new line of reflection. Then, out of man's physical
being came a thousand still small voices daily, whisper-
ing, Think! think! The first-born necessities, few

150 A Walk from

and simple, cried, " Think ! for we want bread, we want
drink, we want shelter and raiment against the cold."
The finer senses cried continually, " Give ! give thought
to this, to that." The Eye, the Ear, the Palate and
every other organ that could receive and diffuse delight,
worked the mental faculties by day and night, up to
the last sunset of the antideluvian world ; and all the
intellectual result of this working Noah took with him
into the ark, and gave to his sons to hand over to
succeeding ages. Flowers that Eve stuck in the hair
of the infant Abel are just now opening the last casket
of their beauty to the favored children of our time.
This, in itself, is a marvellous instance of the law we
are noticing. But what is this to the processes of
thought and observation through which the mind of
man has reached its present expansion ; through which
it has developed all these sciences, arts, industries and
tastes, the literature and the intellectual life of these
bright days of humanity ! The figure is weak, and every
figure would be weak when applied to the ratio or the
result of this progression ; but, at what future age of
time, or of the existence beyond time, will the mind,
that has thus wrought on earth, open its last petal, put
forth no new breathing, unfold no new beauty under
the eye of the Infinite, who breathed it, as an immortal
atom of His own essence, into the being of man ?

London to John C? Groat's. 151

Follow the radius up into the next concentric circle,
and we see this law working to finer and sublimer issues
in man's moral nature. We have glanced at what the
mind has done for and through his physical faculties
and being ; how that being has reacted upon the mind,
and kept all its capacities at work in procuring new
delight to the eye, ear, palate, and all the senses that
yearned for enjoyment. We have noticed how the
inside and outside world acted upon his reasoning
powers in the dawn of creation; how slowly they
mastered the simplest facts and phenomena of life in
and around him ; how slowly they expanded, through
the intervening centuries, to their present development.
The mind is the central personage in the trinity of
man's being; linking the mortal and immortal to its
life and action ; vitalising the body with intelligence,
until every vein, muscle, and nerve, and function
thrills and moves to the impulse of thought ; vitalising
the soul with the vigorous activities of reason, giving
hands as well as wings to its hopes, faiths, loves, and
aspirations ; giving a faculty of speech, action, and
influence to each, and play to all the tempers and
tendencies of its moral nature. Thus all the influences
that the mind could inhale from the material world
through man's physical being, and all it could draw
out of the depths of Divine revelation, were the dew

152 A Walk from

and the light which it was its mission to bring to the
fostering, growth and glory of the human soul. These
were man's means wherewith to shape it for its great
destiny ; these he was to bring to its training and
expansion ; with these he was to co-work with the In-
finite Father of Spirits to fit it for His presence and
fellowship, just as he co- works with Nature in develop-
ing the latent life and faculties of the rose. What
distillations of spiritual influence have dropped down
out of heaven, through the ages, to help onward this
joint work ! What histories of human experience have
come in the other direction to the same end ! fraught
with the emotions of the human heart, from the first
sin and sorrow of Adam to our own griefs, hopes, and
joys ; and all so many lessons for the discipline of this
high-born nature within us !

And yet how slow and almost imperceptible has been
the development of this nature ! How gently and
gradually the expanding influences, human and divine,
have been let in upon its latent faculties ! See with
what delicate fostering the petals of love, faith and
hope were taught to open, little by little, their hidden
life and beauty, taking Moses' history of the process.
First, one human being on the earth, surrounded with
beasts and birds that could give him no intelligent
companionship and no fellow-feeling. Then the beau-

London to John O Groat's. 153

tiful being created to meet these awakening yearnings
of his nature ; then the first outflow and interchange of
human love. The narrative brings us to the next stage
of the sentiment. Sin and sorrow afflict, but unite,
both hearts in the saddest experience of humanity.
They are driven out of the Eden of their first condi-
tion, but their very sufferings and fears re-Eden their
mutual attachments in the very thorns of their troubles
and sorrow. Then another being, of their own flesh,
heir to their changed lot, and to these attachments, is
added to their companionship. The first child's face
that heaven or earth ever saw, opened its baby eyes on
them and smiled in the light of their parental love.
The history goes on. In process of time, there is a
family of families, called a community, embracing hun-
dreds of individuals connected by ties of blood so at-
tenuated that they possess no binding influence. Com-
mon interests, affinities, and sentiments supply the
place of family relationship, and make laws of amity
and equity for them as a population. Next we have
a community of communities, or a commonwealth of
these individual populations, generally called a nation.
Here is a larger lesson for the moral nature. Here
are thousands and tens of thousands of men who never
saw each other's faces. Will this expanded orb of
humanity revolve around the same centre as the first

154 A Walk from

family circle, or the first independent community ?
How can you give it cohesion and harmony ? Extend
the radii of family relationship and influence to its cir-
cumference in every direction. Throne the sovereign
in a parent's chair, to execute a father's laws. He
shall treat them as children, and they each other as
brethren. Here is a grand programme for human
society. Here is a vigorous discipline for the way-
ward will and temper of the human heart. How is a
man to feel and act in these new conditions ? How is
he to regulate his hates and loves, his passions and
appetites, to comply properly with these extended and
complicated relationships ?

About half way from Adam's day to ours$ there came
an utterance from Mount Sinai that anticipated and
answered these questions once for all, and for one and
all. In that august revelation of the Divine Mind,
every command of the Decalogue swung open upon the
pivot of a not, except one ; and that one referred to
man's duty to man, and the promise attached to its
fulfilment was only an earthly enjoyment. All the
rest were restrictive ; to curb this appetite, to bar that
passion, to hedge this impulse, to check that disposi-
tion ; in a word, to hold back the hand from open and
positive transgression. Even the first, relating to His
own Godhead and requirements, was but the first of

London to John O' Groat's. 155

the series of negatives, a pure and simple prohibition
of idolatry. No reward of keeping this first, great
law, reaching beyond the boundary of a temporal con-
dition, was promised at its giving out. With the
headstrong passions, lusts, appetites, and tempers of
flesh and blood bridled and bitted by these restrictions,
and with no motives to obedience beyond the awards
of a short life on earth, the human soul groped its way
through twenty centuries after the Revelation of Sinai,
feeling for the immortality which was not yet revealed
to it, even " as through a glass darkly." Here and
there, but thinly scattered through the ages, divinely
illumined men caught, through the parting seams of
the veil, a transient glimpse and ray of the life to come.
Here and there, obscurely and hesitatingly, they refer
to this vision of their faith. Here and there we seem
to see a hope climbing up out of a good man's heart
into the pathless mystery of a future existence, and
bringing back the fragment of a leaf which it believes
must have grown on one of the trees of life immortal.
Moses, Job, David, and Isaiah give us utterances that
savor of this belief; but they leave us in the dark in
reference to its influence upon their lives. "We cannot
glean, from these incidental expressions, whether it
brought them any steady comfort, or sensibly affected
their happiness.

156 A Walk from

Thus, for four thousand years, the soul of man dashed
its wings against the prison-bars of time, peering into
the night through the cold, relentless gratings for some
fugitive ray of the existence of which it had such strong
and sleepless presentiment. It is a mystery. It may
seem irreverent to approach it even with a conjecture.
Human reason should be humble and silent before it,
and close its questioning lips. It may not, however,
transcend its prerogative to say meekly, perhaps. Per-
haps, then, for two-thirds of the duration that the sun
has measured off to humanity; that life and immortality
which the soul groped after were veiled from its vision,
until all its mental and spiritual faculties had been
trained and strengthened to the ability to grasp and
appropriate the great fact when it should be revealed.
Perhaps it required all the space of forty centuries to
put forth feelers and fibres capable of clinging to the
revelation with the steady hold of faith. Perhaps it
was to prove, by long, decisive probation, what the
unaided human mind could do in constructing its
idealisms of immortality. Perhaps it was permitted
to erect a scaffolding of conceptions on which to receive
the great revelation at the highest possible level of
thought and instinctive sentiment to which man could
attain without supernatural light and help. If this
last perhaps is preferable to the others, where was this

London to John O 1 Groat's. 157

scaffolding the highest ? over Confucius, or Socrates, or
the Scandinavian seer, or Druid or Aztec priest ? Was
it highest at Athens, because there the great apostle to
the Grentiles planted his feet upon it, and said, in the
ears of the Grecian sophists, " Him whom ye ignorantly
worship declare I unto you ?" At that brilliant centre
of pagan civilisation it might have reached its loftiest
altitude, measured by a purely intellectual standard;
but morally, this scaffolding was on the same low level
of human life and character all the world around. The
immortalities erected by Egyptian or Grecian philo-
sophy were no purer, in moral conception and attri-
butes, than the mythological fantasies of the North
American Indians. In them all, human nature was to
have the old play of its passions and appetites ; in some
of them, a wider sweep and sway. There was not one
in the whole set of Grecian deities half so moral and
pure, in sentiment and conduct, as Socrates ; nor were
Jupiter and his subordinate celestials better than the
average kings and courts of Greece. Out of the hay,
wood, and stubble of sheer fancy the human mind was
left to raise these fantastic structures. They exercised
and entertained the imagination, but brought no light
nor strength to the soul ; no superior nor additional
motives to shape the conduct of life. But they did
this, undoubtedly, with all their delusions ; they de-

158 A Walk from

veloped the thought of immortality among the most
benighted races of men. Their most perplexing un-
realities kept the mind restless and almost eager for
some supplementary manifestation ; so that, when the
Star of Bethlehem shone out in the sky of Palestine,
there were men looking heavenward with expectant
eyes at midnight. From that hour to this, and among
pagan tribes of the lowest moral perception, the heralds
of the Great Revelation have found the thought of
another existence active though confused. They have
found everywhere a platform already erected, like that
on which Paul stood in the midst of Mars Hill, and on
which they could stand and say to heathen communi-
ties, " Him whom ye ignorantly worship declare I unto
you ! That future life and immortality which your
darkened eyes and hungry souls have been groping and
hungring for, bring we to you, bright as the sun, in this
great gospel of Divine Love." Had the Star of Bethlehem
appeared a century earlier, it might not have met an up-
turned eye. If the Saviour of mankind had come into
the world in Solomon's day, not even a manger might
have been found to cradle His first moments of human
life ; no Simeon waiting in the temple to greet the great
salvation He brought to our race in His baby hands.

Here, then, commences, as it were, the central era of
the soul's training in time. Here heaven opened upon

London to John O 1 Groat's. 159

it the full sunlight and sunwarmth of its glorious life
and immortality. Here fell upon its opening faculties
the dews and rays and spiritual influences which were
to shape its being and destiny. Here commenced such
co-working to this end as can find no measure nor
simile in any other sphere of co-operative activities in
the world below or above. Here the Trinity of man
and the Trinity of the Godhead came into a co-action
and fellowship overpassing the highest outside wonder
of the universe. And all this co-working, fellowship,
and partnership has been repeated in the experience of
every individual soul that has been fitted for this great
immortality. Here, too, this co-working is a law, not
an incident ; most marvellously, mightily, and minutely
a law, as legislatively and executively as that which we
have seen acting upon the development of the flower.
Had not the great apostle, who was caught up into the
third heavens and heard things unutterable, spoken of
this law in such bold words, it would seem rash and
irreverent in us to approach so near to its sublime
revelation. Not ours but his they are ; and it is bold
enough in us to repeat them. He said it : that He, to
whose name every knee should bow, and every tongue
confess ; to whom belonged and who should possess and
rule all the kingdoms of the earth, " was made under
the law," not of Moses, not of human nature only, but

160 A Walk from

under this very law of co- WORKING. Through this the
world was to be regenerated and filled with His life
and light. Through this a new creation was to be
enfolded in the bosom of His glory, of grander dimen-
sions and of diviner attributes than that over which the
morning stars sang at the birth of time. Said this
law to the individual soul : " Work out your salvation
with fear and trembling, for it is (rod that worketh in
you to will and to do of His own good pleasure." To
will and to do. It is His own good will and pleasure
that the soul shall be fitted and lifted up to its high
destiny through this co- working. It was His power to
raise it to that condition without man's participation or
conscious acquiescence ; but it was His will and pleasure
to enact this law of salvation. Looking across the
circumference of the individual soul, what says this
law ? " Go ye out into all the world and preach the
gospel to every creature, and, lo, I am with you unto
the end," not as an invisible companion, not merely
with the still small voice of the Comforter to cheer you
in trial, weakness and privation ; but with you as a
co-worker, with the irresistible energies of the Spirit of
Power. He might have done the whole work alone.
He might have sent forth twelve, and twelve times
twelve legions of angels, and given each a voice as loud
as His who is to wake the dead, and bid them preach

London to John O 1 Groat's. 161

His gospel in the ears of every human being. He
might have given a tongue to every breathing of the
breeze, an articulate speech to every ray of light, and
sent them out with their ceaseless voices on the great
errand of His love. It was His power to do this. He
did not do it, because it was His will and pleasure to
put Himself under this law we have followed so far ; to
make men His co-workers in this new creation, and co-
heirs with Him in all its joy and glory. So completely
has He made this law His rule of action, that, for
eighteen hundred years, we have not a single instance
in which the life and immortality which He brought
to light have been revealed to a human soul without
the direct and active participation of a human instru-
mentality. So completely have His meekest servants
on earth put themselves under this law, that not one
of them dares to expect, hope, or pray that He will
reveal Himself to a single benighted heathen mind
without this human co-working.

Thus, begin where you will, in the flower oi the
field or the hyssop by the wall, and ascend from sphere
to sphere, until there is no more space in things and
beings created to draw another circumferential line,
and you will see the action and result of this great law
of Co-operative Activities. When I first looked within
the lids of that hollyhock and was incited to read
M

1 62 A IV a Ik from

the rudimental lessons of the new leaves that man's
art had added to its scant, original volume, I had no
thought of finding so much matter printed on its
pages. I have transcribed it here in the order of its
paragraphs, hoping that some who read them may see
in this life of flowers an interest they may have
partially overlooked.

London to John O Groat's. 163

CHAPTER IX.

VISIT TO A THREE-THOUSAND-ACRE FARM SAMUEL JONAS HIS AGRI-
CULTURAL OPERATIONS, THEIR EXTENT, SUCCESS, AND GENERAL
ECONOMY.

THE rain having ceased, I resumed my walk, in a
southerly direction, to Chrishall Grange, the resi-
dence of Samuel Jonas, who may be called the largest
farmer in England ; not, perhaps, in extent of territory
occupied, but in the productive capacity of the land
cultivated, and in the values realised from it. It is
about four miles east of Royston, bordering on the
three counties of Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, and
Essex, though lying mainly in the latter. It contains
upwards of 3,000 acres, and nearly every one of them
is arable, and under active cultivation. It consists of
five farms, belonging to four different landlords ; still
the} r are so contiguous and coherent that they form
substantially one great block. No one could be more
deeply impressed with the magnitude of such an esta-
blishment, and of the operations it involves, than a
New England farmer. Taking the average of our
agriculturists, their holdings or occupations, to use an
M 2

164 A Walk from

English term, will not exceed 100 acres to each ; and,
including woodland, swamp and mountain, not over
half of this space can he cultivated. To the owner and
tiller of such a farm, a visit to Mr. Jonas' occupation
must be very interesting and instructive. Here is a
man who cultivates a space which thirty Connecticut
farmers would feel themselves rich to own and occupy,
with families making a population of full two hundred
souls, supporting and filling a church and school-house.
In the great West of America, where cattle are bred
and fed somewhat after the manner of Russian steppes
or Mexican ranches, such an occupation would not
be unusual nor unexpected ; but in the very heart of
England, containing a space less than the state of
Virginia, a tract of such extent and value in the hands
of a single farmer is a fact which a New Englander
must regard at first with no little surprise. He will
not wonder how one man can rent such a space, but
how he can till it to advantage ; how, even with the
help of several intelligent and active sons, he can direct
and supervise operations which fill the hands of thirty
solid farmers of Massachusetts. Two specific circum-
stances enable him to perform this undertaking.

In the first place, agriculture in England is reduced
to an exact and rigid science. To use a nautical phrase,
it is all plain sailing. The course is charted even in

London to John O* Groat's.

165

the written contract with the landlord. The very term,
" course" is adopted to designate the direction which
the English farmer is to observe. Skilled hands are
plenty and pressing to man the enterprise. With such
a chart, and such a force, and such an open sea, it is as
easy for him to sail the " Great Eastern " as a Thames
schooner. The helm of the great ship plays as freely
and faithfully to the motion of his will as the rudder of
the small craft. Then the English farmer has a great
advantage over the American in this circumstance : he
can hire cheaply a grade of labor which is never brought
to our market. Men of great skill and experience, who
in America would conduct farms of their own, and
could not be hired at any price, may be had here in
abundance for foremen, at from twelve to sixteen shil-
lings, or from three to four dollars a week, they board-
ing and lodging themselves. And the number of such
men is constantly increasing, from two distinct causes.
In the first place, there is a large generation of agri-
cultural laborers in England, now in the prime of
manhood, who have just graduated, as it were, through
all the scientific processes of agriculture developed in
the last fifteen years. The ploughmen, cowmen, cart-
men, and shepherds, even, have become familiar with
the established routine ; and every set of these hands
can produce one or two active and intelligent laborers

1 66 A Walk from

who will gladly and ably fill the post of under-foreman
for a shilling or two a week of advanced wages. Then,
by the constant absorption of small holdings into large
farms, which is going on more rapidly from this in-
creased facility of managing great occupations, a very
considerable number of small farmers every year are fall-
ing into the labor market, being reduced to the neces-
sity of either emigrating to cheaper lands beyond the
sea, or of hiring themselves out at home as managers,
foremen, or common laborers on estates thus enlarged
by their little holdings. From these two sources of
supply the English tenant-farmer, beyond all question,
is able to cultivate a larger space, and conduct more
extensive operations than any other agriculturist in the
world, at least by free labor.

The first peculiarity of this large occupation I noticed,
was the extent of the fields into which it was divided.
I had never seen any so large before in England.
There were only three of the whole estate under 60,
and some contained more than 400 acres each, giving
the whole an aspect of amplitude like that of a rolling
prairie farm in Illinois. Not one of the little, irregular
morsels of land half swallowed by its broad-bottomed
hedging, which one sees so frequently in an English
landscape, could be found on this great holding. The
white thorn fences were new, trim, and straight, occu-

London to John O 1 Groat's. 167

pying as little space as possible. The five amalgamated
farms are all light turnip soil, with the exception of
about 200 acres, which are well drained. The whole
surface resembles that of a heavy ground swell of the
sea ; nearly all the fields declining gently in different
directions. The view from the rounded crest of the
highest wave was exceedingly picturesque and beauti-
ful, presenting a vista of plenty which Ceres of classic
mythology never saw; for never, in ancient Greece,
Italy, or Egypt, were there crops of vegetation so
diversified and contrasting with each other as are in-
terspersed over an English farm of the present day.

It is doubtful if 3,000 acres of land, lying in one
solid block, could be found in England better adapted
for testing and rewarding the most scientific and ex-
pensive processes of agriculture than this great occu-
pation of Mr. Jonas. Certainly, no equal space could
present a less quantity of waste land, or occupy less in
hedges or fences. And it is equally certain, that no
estate of equal size is more highly cultivated, or yields
a greater amount of production per acre. Its occupant,
also, is what may be called an hereditary farmer. His
father and his remote ancestors were farmers, and he,
as in the case of the late Mr. Webb, has attained to his
present position as an agriculturist by practical farming.

Mr. Jonas cultivates his land on the " Four-course

1 68 A Walk from

system." This very term indicates the degree to which
English agriculture has been reduced to a precise and
rigid science. It means here, that the whole arable
extent of his estate is divided equally between four
great crops ; or, wheat, 750 acres ; barley and oats,
750 ; seeds and pulse, 750 ; and roots, 750. Now, an
American farmer, in order to form an approximate idea
of the amount of labor given to the growth of these
crops, must remember that all these great fields of
wheat, oats, barley, turnips, beans, and peas, contain-
ing in all over 2,000 acres, are hoed by hand once or
twice. His cereals are all drilled in at 7 inches apart,
turnips at 17. The latter are horse-hoed three or four
times ; and as they are drilled on the flat, or without
ridging the surface of the ground, they are crossed with
a horse-hoe with eight V shaped blades. This operation
leaves the young plants in bunches, which are singled
out by a troop of children. One hand-hoeing and two
or three more horse-hoeings finish the labor given to
their cultivation. It is remarkable what mechanical
skill is brought to bear upon these operations. In the
first place, the plough cuts a furrow as straight and
even as if it were turned by machinery, A kind of
esprit de corps animates the ploughmen to a vigorous
ambition in the work. They are trained to it with as
much singleness of purpose as the smiths of Sheffield

London to John O* Groat's. 169

are to the forging of penknife blades. On a large
estate like that occupied by Mr. Jonas, they constitute
an order, not of Odd Fellows, but of Straight Furrow-
men, and are jealous of the distinction. When the
ground is well prepared, and made as soft, smooth, and
even as a garden, the drilling process is performed with
a judgment of the eye and skill of hand more marvel-
lous still. The straightness of the lines of verdure
which, in a few weeks, mark the tracks of the seed-
tubes, is surprising. They are drawn and graded with
such precision that, when the plants are at a certain
height, a horse-hoe, with eight blades, each wide enough
to cut the whole intervening space between two rows,
is passed, hoeing four or five drills at once. Of course,
if the lines of the drill and hoe did not exactly corres-
pond with each other, whole rows of turnips would be
cut up and destroyed. I saw this process going on in
a turnip field, and thought it the most skilful operation
connected with agriculture that I had ever witnessed.

One of the principal advantages Mr. Jonas realises
in cultivating such an extent of territory, is the ability
to economise his working forces, of man, beast and
agricultural machinery. He saves what may be called
the superfluous fractions, which small farmers frequently
lose. For instance, a man with only fifty acres would
need a pair of stout horses, a plough, cart and all the

170 A Walk from

other implements necessary for the growth and gather-
ing of the usual crops. Now Mr. Jonas has proved by
experience, that, in cultivating his great occupation,
the average force of two and a quarter horses is suffi-
cient for a hundred acres. Here is a saving of almost
one half the expense of horse-force per acre which the
small farmer incurs, and full one half of the use of
carts, ploughs, and other implements. The whole
numher of horses employed is about seventy-six ; and
the number of men and boys about a hundred. The
whole of this great force is directed by Mr. Jonas and
his sons with as much apparent ease and equanimity as
the captain of a Cunarder would manifest in guiding a
steamship across the Atlantic. The helm and ropes of
the establishment obey the motion of one mind with
the same readiness and harmony.

A fact or two may serve an American farmer as a
tangible measure whereby to estimate the extent of the
operations thus conducted by one man. To come up
to the standard of scientific and successful agriculture
in England, it is deemed requisite that a tenant farmer,
on renting an occupation, should have capital sufficient
to invest ten pounds, or fifty dollars, per acre in
stocking it with cattle, sheep, horses, farming imple-
ments, fertilisers, &c. Mr. Jonas, beyond a doubt,
invests capital after this ratio upon the estate he tills.

London to John O 1 Groat's.

171

If so, then the total amount appropriated to the land
which he rents cannot be less than 30,000, or nearly
150,000 dollars. The inventory of his live stock, taken
at last Michaelmas, resulted in these figures : Sheep,
6,481; horses, 2,487; bullocks, 2,218; pigs, 452;
making a grand total of 11,638. Every animal bred
on the estate is fatted, but by no means with the grain
and roots grown upon it. The outlay for oil-cake and
corn purchased for feeding, amounts to about 4,000
per annum. Another heavy expenditure is about
1,700 yearly for artificial fertilisers, consisting of
guano and blood-manure. Mr. Jonas is one of the
directors of the company formed for the manufacture
of the latter.

The whole income of the establishment is realised
from two sources meat and grain. And this is the
distinguishing characteristic of English farming gene-
rally. Not a pound of hay, straw or roots is sold off
the estate. Indeed, this is usually prohibited by the
conditions of the contract with the landlord. So
completely has Mr. Jonas adhered to this rule, that
he could not give me the market price of hay, straw
or turnips per ton, as he had never sold any, and was
not in the habit of noticing the market quotations of
those products. I was surprised at one fact which I
learned in connection with his economy. He keeps

172 A Walk from

about 170 bullocks ; buying in October and selling in
May. Now, it would occasion an American farmer
some wonderment to be told, that this great herd of
cattle is fed and fatted almost entirely for the manure
they make. It is doubtful if the difference between the
cost and selling price averages 2, or ten dollars per
head. For instance, the bullocks bought in will
average 13 or 14. A ton of bruised cake and some
meal are given to each beast before it is sent to market,
costing from 10 to 12. When sold, the bullocks
average 24 or 25. Thus the cake and the meal
equal the whole difference between the buying and sell-
ing price, so that all the roots, chaff and attendance go
entirely to the account of manure. These three items,
together with the value of pasturage for the months the
cattle may lie in the fields, from October to May inclu-
sive, could hardly amount to less than 5 per beast,
which, for 170, would be 850. Then 1,700 are
paid annually for guano and artificial manures. Now
add the value of the wheat, oat and barley straw grown
on 1,500 acres, and mostly thrown into the barn-yards
or used as bedding for the stables, and you have one
great division of the fertilising department of Chrishall
Grange. The amount of these three items cannot be
less than 3,000. Then there is another source of
fertilisation nearly as productive and valuable. Up-

London to John O 1 Groat's. 173

wards of 3,000 sheep are kept on the estate, of which
1,200 are breeding ewes. These are folded, acre by
acre, on turnips, cole or trefoil, and those fattened for
the market are fed with oil-cake in the field. The
locusts of Egypt could not have left the earth barer of
verdure than these sheep do the successive patches of
roots in which they are penned for twenty-four or forty-
eight hours, nor could any other process fertilise the
land more thoroughly and cheaply. Then 76 horses
and 200 fattening hogs add their contingent to the
manurial expenditure and production of the establish-
ment. Thus the fertilising material applied to the
estate cannot amount to less than 5,000, or 24,000
dollars per annum.

Sheep are the most facile and fertile source of nett
income on the estate. Indeed, nearly all the profit on
the production of meat is realised from them. Most of
those I saw were Southdowns and Hampshires, pure or
crossed, with here and there a Leicester. After being
well fattened, they fetch in the market about double
the price paid for them as stock sheep. About 2,000,
thus fattened, including lambs, are sold yearly. They
probably average about 2, or ten dollars per head ;
thus amounting to the nice little sum of 4,000 a year,
as one of the sources of income.

Perhaps it would be easier to estimate the total ex-

1 74 A Walk from

penditure than the gross income of such an establish-
ment as that of Mr. Jonas. We have aggregated the
former in a lump ; assuming that the whole capital
invested in rent, live stock, agricultural machinery,
manures, labor of man and horse, fattening material,
&c., amounts to 30,000. We may extract from this
aggregate several estimated items which will indicate
the extent of his operations, putting the largest expen-
diture at the head of the list.

Corn and oil-cake purchased for feeding 4,000

Guano and manufactured manures 1,700

Labor of 100 men and boys at the average of 20 per annum . . 2,000

Labor of 76 horses, including their keep, 20 per annum 1,500

Use and wear of steam-engine and agricultural machinery .... 500
Commutation money to men for beer 40Q

10,100

These are some of the positive annual outlays, with-
out including rent, interest on capital invested, and
other items that belong to the debit side of the ledger.
The smallest on the list given I would commend to the
consideration of every New England farmer who may
read these pages. It is stated under the real fact. The
capacity of English laborers for drinking strong beer
is a wonder to the civilised world. They seem to cling-
to this habit as to a vital condition of their very life
and being. One would be tempted to think that malt
liquor was a primary and bread a secondary necessity

London to John O Groat's. 175

to them; it must cost them most of the two, at any
rate. And generally they are as particular about the
quality as the quantity, and complain if it is not of
" good body," as well as full tale. In many cases the
farmer furnishes it to them ; sometimes brewing it
himself, but more frequently buying it already made.
Occasionally a farmer " commutes " with his men ;
allowing a certain sum of money weekly in lieu of beer,
leaving them to buy and use it as they please. I
understood that Mr. Jonas adopts the latter course,
not only to save himself the trouble of furnishing and
rationing such a large quantity of beer, but also to
induce the habit among his men of appropriating the
money he gives them instead of drink to better pur-
poses. The sum paid to them last year was actually
452, or about 2,200 dollars ! Now it would be quite
safe to say, that there is not a farm in the state of
Connecticut that produces pasturage, hay, grain, and
roots enough to pay this beer-bill of a single English
occupation ! This fact may not only serve to show the
scale of magnitude which agricultural enterprise has
assumed in the hands of such men as Mr. Jonas, but
also to indicate to our American farmers some of the
charges upon English agriculture from which they are
exempt ; thanks to the Maine Law, or, to a better one
still, that of voluntary disuse of strong drink on our

176 A Walk from

farms. I do not believe that 100 laboring men and
boys could be found on one establishment in Great
Britain more temperate, intelligent, industrious, and
moral than the set employed by Mr. Jonas. Still,
notice the tax levied upon his land by this beer-impost.
It amounted last year to three English shillings, or
72 cents, on every acre of the five consolidated farms,
including all the space occupied by hedges, copses,
buildings, &c. Suppose a Maine farmer were obliged,
by an inexorable law of custom, to pay a beer-tax of
72 cents per acre on his estate of 150 acres, or 108
dollars annually, would he not be glad to " commute "
with his hired men, by leaving them in possession of
his holding and migrating to some distant section of
the country where such a custom did not exist ?

The gross income of this great holding it would be
more difficult to estimate. But no one can doubt the
yearly issues of Mr. Jonas' balance-sheet, when he has
been able to expand his operations gradually to their
present magnitude from the capital and experience
acquired by successful farming. Perhaps the principal
sources of revenue would approximate to the following
figures :

2,000 fat sheep and lambs at 2 4,000

150 bullocksat 25 3,750

Carried forward 7,750

177

London to John OGroafs.

Brought forward 7,750

200 fat pigs = 40,000 Ibs., at 4d 666

22,500 bushels of wheat at 6s 6,750

9,375 oats at 2s 937 -

7,500 barley at 3s 1,125 z

Total of these estimated items 17,228

This, of course, is a mere estimate of the principal
sources of income upon which Mr. Jonas depends for
a satisfactory result of his balance-sheet. Each item is
probably within the mark. I have put down the crop of
wheat of 750 acres at the average of 30 bushels per
acre, and at 6s. per bushel, which are quite moderate
figures. I have assumed 375 acres each for barley and
oats, estimating the former at 40 bushels per acre, and
the latter at 50 ; then reserving half of the two crops
for feeding and fatting the live stock; also all the
beans, peas, and roots for the same purpose. If the
estimate is too high on some items, the products sold^
and not enumerated in the foregoing list, such as cole
and other seeds, will rectify, perhaps, the differences,
and make the general result presented closely approxi-
mate to the real fact.

As there is probably no other farm in Great Britain
of the same size so well calculated to test the best
agricultural science and economy of the day as the
great occupation of Mr. Jonas, and as I am anxious
to convey to American farmers a well -developed idea

178 A Walk from

of what that science and economy are achieving in this
country, I will dwell upon a few other facts connected
with this establishment. The whole space of 3,000 acres
is literally under cultivation, or in a sense which we
in New England do not generally give to that term
that is, there is not, I believe, a single acre of per-
manent meadow in the whole territory. All the vast
amount of hay consumed, and all the pasture grasses
have virtually to be grown like grain. There is so
much ploughing and sowing involved in the production
of these grass crops, that they are called " seeds." Thus,
by this four-course system, every field passes almost
annually under a different cropping, and is mowed two
or three times in ten years. This fact, in itself, will
not only suggest the immense amount of labor applied,
but also the quality and condition of 3,000 acres of
land that can be surfaced to the scythe in this manner.
The seeds or grasses sown by Mr. Jonas for pasturage
and hay are chiefly white and red clover and trefoil.
His rule of seeding is the following :

Wheat, from 8 to 10 pecks per acre.

Barley 12 to 14

Oats 18 to 22

Winter Beans, 8

Ked Clover, 20 Ibs.

White Clover, 16 Ibs.

Trefoil, 30 to 35 Ibs.

This, in New England, would be called very heavy

London to John O 1 Groat's. 179

seeding, especially in regard to oats and the grasses.

1 believe that 12 pecks of oats to the acre rather exceed
our average rule. Good clover seed should weigh 2 Ihs.
to the quart, and 8 quarts, or 16 Ibs., are the usual
seeding with us.

As labor of horse and man must be economised to
the best advantage on such an estate, it may be inte-
resting to know the expense of the principal operations.
The cost of ploughing averages 7s. 6d. or $1. 80c. per
acre. For roots the land is ploughed three or four
times, besides harrowing, drilling, and rolling. The
hoeing of wheat and roots varies from 2s. to 5s., or
from 48 cents to $1. 20c. per acre.

The sheep are all folded on turnips or grass fields,
except the breeding ewes in the lambing season. The
enclosures are made of hurdles, of which all reading
Americans have read, but not one in a thousand ever
has seen. They are a kind of diminutive, portable post-
and-rail fence, of the New England pattern, made up
in permanent lengths, so light that a stout man might
carry two or three of them on his shoulders at once.
The two posts are sawed or split pieces of wood, about

2 inches thick, 3 wide, and from 5 to 6 feet in length.
They are generally square-morticed for the rails, which
are frequently what we should call split hoop-poles,
but in the best kind are slats of hard wood, about two

N2

1 80 A Walk from

and a half inches wide and one in thickness. Midway
"between the two posts, the rails are nailed to an upright
slat or brace, to keep them from swaying. Sometimes
a farmer makes his own hurdles, thus furnishing indoor
work for his men in winter, when they cannot labor in
the fields ; but most generally they are bought of those
who manufacture them on a large scale. Some idea of
the extent of sheep-folding on Chrishall Grange may
be inferred from the fact, that the hurdling on it, if
placed in one straight, continuous line, would reach
full ten miles!

A portable steam-engine, of 12 horse-power, looking
like a common railway locomotive strayed from its track
and taken up and housed in a farmer's waggon-shed,
performs prodigies of activity and labor. Indeed, search
the three realms through and through, and you would
hardly find one on its own legs doing such remarkable
varieties of work. Briareus, with all his fabled facul-
ties, never had such numerous and supple fingers as
this creature of human invention. When set a-going,
they are clattering and whisking and frisking every-
where, on the barn-floor, on the hay-loft, in the granary,
under the eaves, down cellar, and all this at the same
time. It is doubtful if any stationary engine in a
machine shop ever performed more diversified operations
at once ; thus proving most conclusively how a farmer

London to John O* Groat's. 181

may work motive power which it was once thought
preposterous in him to think of using. It threshes
wheat and other kinds of grain at the rate of from
400 to 500 bushels a day ; it conveys the straw up to
a platform across what we call the " great beams," where
it is cut into chaff and dropped into a great bay, at the
trifling expense of sixpence, or twelve cents, per quan-
tity grown on an acre ! While it is doing this in one
direction, it is turning machinery in another that cleans
and weighs the grain off into sacks ready for the
market. Open the doors right and left and you find
it at work like reason, breaking oil-cake, grinding corn
for the fat stock, turning the grindstone, pitching,
pounding, paring, rubbing, grubbing, and twisting,
threshing, wrestling, chopping, flopping, and hopping
after the manner of " The Waters of Lodore."

The housings for live stock are most admirably con-
structed as well as extensive, and all the great yards
are well fitted for making and delivering manure.
I noticed here the best arrangement for feeding swine
that I had ever seen before, and of a very simple
character. Instead of revolving troughs, or those that
are to be pulled out like drawers to be cleaned, a long,
stationary one, generally of iron, extends across the
whole breadth of the compartment next to the feeding
passage. The board or picket-fence forming this end

1 82 A Walk from

of the enclosure, from 8 to 12 feet in length, is hung
on a pivot at each side, playing in an iron ring or
socket let into each of the upright posts that support
it. Midway in the lower rail of this fence is a drop
bolt which falls into the floor just behind the trough.
At the feeding time, the man has only to raise this
bolt and let it fall on the inner side, and he has the
whole length and width of the trough free to clear with
a broom and to fill with the feed. Then, raising the
bolt and bringing it back to its first place, the operation
is performed in a minute with the greatest economy
and convenience.

There was one feature of this great farm home which
I regarded with much satisfaction. It was the housing
of the laborers employed on the estate. This is done
in blocks of well-built, well-ventilated, and very com-
fortable cottages, all within a stone's throw of the noble
old mansion occupied by Mr. Jonas. Thus, no long
and weary miles after the fatigue of the day, or before
its labor begins, have to be walked over by his men in
the cold and dark, as in many cases in which the agri-
cultural laborer is obliged to trudge on foot from a
distant village to his work, making a hard and sunless
journey at both ends of the day.

Although my visit at this, perhaps the largest, farm-
ing establishment in England, occupied only a few

London to John C? Groat's. 183

hours, I felt, on leaving, that I had never spent an
equal space of time more profitably and pleasantly in
the pursuit or appreciation of agricultural knowledge.
The open and large-hearted hospitality and genial
manners of the proprietor and his family seemed to
correspond with the dimensions and qualities of his
holding, and to complete, vitalise, and beautify the
symmetries of a true ENGLISH FARMER'S HOME.

1 84 A Walk from

CHAPTEE X.

ROYSTON AND ITS SPECIALITIES ENTERTAINMENT IN A SMALL VILLAGE

ST. IVES VISITS TO ADJOINING VILLAGES A FEN-FARM

CAPITAL INVESTED IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

COMPARED ALLOTMENTS AND GARDEN TENANTRY BARLEY

GROWN ON OATS.

I1ROM Chrishall Grange I went on to Royston,
where I found very quiet and comfortable quarters
in a small inn, called "The Catherine Wheel," for
what reason it is not yet clear to my mind, and the
landlady could not enlighten me on the subject. I am
not sufficiently "posted up" in the history of the
minor or local celebrities of the country to know which
one or what is designed to be honored by this tavern
souvenir. I have noticed two inns in London of the
same name, and have seen it mounted on several other
public houses in different parts of England. Is the
whole of it a human appellation, or is it a half and half
composition, meaning Catherine's Wheel, in the posses-
sive case, or the Catherine Wheel, in the same order of
signification as the Wellington Boot? I intend to
inquire out the private history of this name and make
a note of it in the Appendix.

London to John O' Groat's.

185

Boyston is a goodly and comfortable town, just
inside the eastern boundary of Hertfordshire. It has
its full share of half-legible and interesting antiquities,
including the ruins of a royal palace, a cave, and
several other broken monuments of the olden time,
all festooned with the web-work of hereditary fancies,
legends, and shreds of unravelled history dyed to the
vivid colors of variegated imagination. It also boasts
and enjoys a great, breezy, furzy common, large enough
to hold such another town, and which few in the king-
dom can show. Then, if it cannot cope with Grlaston-
bury in showing, to the envious and credulous world,
a thorn-tree planted by Joseph of Arimathsea, and
blossoming always at Christmas, it can fly a bird of
greater antiquity, which never flapped its wings else-
where, so far as I can learn. It may be the lineal
descendant of Noah's raven that has come down
to this particular community without a cross with
any other branch of the family. It is called "The
Eoyston Crow," and is a variety of the genus which
you will find in no other country. It is a great,
heavy bird, larger than his colored American cousin,
and is distinguished by a white back. Indeed, seen
walking at a distance, he looks like our Bobolink
expanded to the size of a large hen-hawk. To have
such a wild bird all to themselves, and of its own free

1 86 A Walk from

will, notwithstanding the length and power of its
wings, and the force of centrifugal attractions, is a
distinction which the good people of this favored town
have good reason to appreciate at its proper value.
Nor are they insensible to the honor. The town
printer put into my hands an annual publication called
" THE ROYSTON CROW," containing much interesting
and valuable information, especially in reference to
chronology, astronomy, necrology, and local history.
It might properly have embraced a chapter on enty-
mology ; but, perhaps, it would have been impolitic
for the personal interests of the bird to have given
wide publicity to facts in this department of knowledge.
For, after all, there may exist in the neighborhood
certain special kinds of bugs and other insects which
lie at the foundation of his preference for the locality.

The next day I again faced northward, and walked
as far as Cuckfield, a small, rambling village, which
looked as if it had not shaved and washed its face, and
put on a clean shirt for a shocking length of time. It
was dark when I reached it; having walked twelve
miles after three p.m. There was only one inn,
properly speaking, in the town, and since the old
coaching time, it had contracted itself into the fag-end
of a large, dark, seedy-looking building, where it lived
by selling beer and other sharp and cheap drinks to

London to John O 1 Groat's. 187

the villagers ; nineteen-twentieths of whom appeared to
be agricultural laborers. The entertainment proffered
on the sign over the door was evidently limited to the
tap-room. Indeed, this and the great, low-jointed
and brick-floored kitchen opening into it, seemed to
constitute all the living or inhabited space in the
building. I saw, at a glance, that the chance for a
bed was faint and small ; and I asked Landlord Rufus
for one doubtingly, as one would ask for a ready-made
pulpit or piano at a common cabinet-maker's shop.
He answered me clearly enough before he spoke, and
he spoke as if answering a strange and half-impertinent
question, looking at me searchingly, as if he suspected
I was quizzing him. His " No ! " was short and
decided ; but, seeing I was honest and earnest in the
inquiry, he softened his negative with the explanation
that their beds were all full. It seemed strange to me
that this should be so in a building large enough for
twenty, and I hesitated hopefully, thinking he might
remember some small room in which he might put me
for the night. To awaken a generous thought in him
in this direction, I intimated how contented I would
be with the most moderate accommodation. But it was
in vain. The house was full, and I must seek for
lodging elsewhere. There were two or three other
public houses in the village that might take me in. I

1 88 A Walk from

went to them one by one. They all kept plenty of
beer, but no bed. They, too, looked at me with
surprise for asking for such a thing. Apparently, there
had been no demand for such entertainment by any
traveller since the stage-coach ceased to run through
the village. I went up and down, trying to negociate
with the occupants of some of the best-looking cottages
for a cot or bunk ; but they had none to spare, as the
number of wondering children that stared at me kindly,
at once suggested before I put the question.

It was now quite dark, and I was hungry and tired ;
and the prospect of an additional six miles' walk was
not very animating. What next ? I will go back to
Landlord Eufus and try a new influence on his sensi-
bilities. Who knows but it will succeed ? I will touch
him on his true character as a Briton. So I went back,
with my last chance hanging on the experiment. I
told him I was an American traveller, weary, hungry
and infirm of health, and would pay him an extra price
for an extra effort to give me a bed for the night. I
did not say all this in a Romanus-civis-sum sort of
tone. No ! dear, Honest Old Abe, you would have
done the same in my place. I made the great
American Eagle coo like a dove in the request ; and it
touched the best instincts of the British Lion within
the man. It was evident in a moment that I had put

London to ^o/m O' Groat's. 189

my case in a new aspect to him. He would talk with
the "missus;" he withdrew into the back kitchen, a
short conference ensued, and both came out together
and informed me that they had found a bed, unexpec-
tedly vacant, for my accommodation. And they would
get up some tea and bread and butter for me, too.
Capital ! a sentiment of national pride stole in between
every two feelings of common satisfaction at this result.
The thought would come in and whisper, not for your
importunity as a common fellow mortal were this bed
and this loaf unlocked to you, but because you were
an American citizen.

So I followed " the missus " into that great kitchen,
and sat down in one corner of the huge fire-place while
she made the tea. It was a capacious museum of
culinary curiosities of the olden time, all arranged in
picturesque groups, yet without any aim at effect.
Pots, kettles, pans, spits, covers, hooks and trammels
of the Elizabethan period, apparently the heir-looms
of several intersecting generations, showed in the fire-
light like a work of artistry ; the sharp, silvery
brightness of the tin and the florid flush of burnished
copper making distinct disks in the darkness. It was
with a rare sentiment of comfort that I sat by that fire
of crackling faggots, looked up at the stars that dropped
in their light as they passed over the top of the great

190 A Walk from

chimney, and glanced around at the sides of that old
English kitchen, pannelled with plates and platters and
dishes of all sizes and uses. And this fire was kindled
and this tea-kettle was singing for me really because
I was an American ! I could not forget that so I
deemed it my duty to keep up the character. There-
fore, I told the missus and her bright-eyed niece a great
many stories about America; some of which excited
their admiration and wonder. Thus I sat at the little,
round, three-legged table, inside the outspreading
chimney, for an hour or more, and made as cosy and
pleasant a meal of it as ever I ate. Besides all this, I
had the best bed in the house, and several "Good
nights!" on retiring to it, uttered with hearty good-
will by voices softened to an accent of kindness.
Next morning I was introduced into the best parlor,
and had a capital breakfast, and then resumed my
walk with a pleasant memory of my entertainment
in that village inn.

I passed through a fertile and interesting section to
St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire. Here I remained with
some friends for a week, visiting neighboring villages
by day and returning at night. St. Ives is a pleasant,
well-favored town, just large enough to constitute a
coherent, neighborly, and well-regulated community.
It is the centre-piece of a rich, rural picture, which,

London to John O' Groat's. 191

without any strikingly salient features, pleases the
eye with lineaments of quiet beauty symmetrically
developed by the artistry of nature. The river Ouse
meanders through a wide, fertile flat, or what the
Scotch would call a strath, which gently rises on
each side into pleasantly undulating uplands. Parks,
groves, copses and hedge-row trees are interspersed
very happily, and meadow, pasture, and grain-fields
seen through them, with villages, hamlets, farm-houses,
and isolated cottages, make up a landscape that grows
more and more interesting as you contemplate it. And
this placid locality, with its peaceful river sesmingly
sleeping in the bosom of its long and level meadows,
was the scene of Oliver Cromwell's young, fiery man-
hood. Here, where Nature invites to tranquil occupa-
tions and even exercises of the mind, he trained the
latent energies of his will for action in the great drama
that overturned a throne and transformed a nation.
Here, till very lately, stood his " barn," and here he
drilled the first squadron of his "Ironsides."

My friend and host drove me one day to see a fen
farm a few miles beyond Eamsey, at which we remained
over night and enjoyed the old-fashioned English hos-
pitality of the establishment with lively relish. It was
called " The Four-Hundred- Acre Farm," to distinguish
it from a hundred others, laid out on the same dead

192 A Walk from

level, with lines and angles as straight and sharp as
those of a brick. You will meet scores of persons in
England who speak admiringly of the great prairies of
our Western States but I never saw one in Illinois as
extensive as the vast level expanse you may see in
Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. In fact, the space
of a large county has been fished up out of a shallow
sea of salt water by human labor and capital. I will
not dwell here upon the expense, process, and result of
this gigantic operation. It would require a whole
chapter to convey an approximate idea of the character
and dimensions of the enterprise. The feat of Cyrus
in turning the current of the Euphrates was the mere
making of a short mill-race compared with the labor of
lifting up these millions of acres bodily out of the flood
that had covered and held them in quiescent solution
since the world began.

This Great Prairie of England, generally called here
the Fens, or Fenland, would be an interesting and
instructive section for the agriculturists of our Western
States to visit. They would see how such a region can
be made quite picturesque, as well as luxuriantly pro-
ductive. Let them look off upon the green sea from
one of the upland waves, and it will be instructive to
them to see and know, that all the hedge-trees, groves,
and copses that intersect and internect the vast expanse

London to John O 1 Groat's. 193

of green and gold were planted by man's hands. Such
a landscape would convince them that the prairies of
Illinois and Iowa may be recovered from their almost
depressing monotony by the same means. The soil of
this district is apparently the same as that around
Chicago black and deep, on a layer of clay. It pul-
verises as easily in dry weather, and makes the same
inky and sticky composition in wet. To give it more
body, or to cross it with a necessary and supplementary
element, a whole field is often trenched by the spade as
clean as one could be furrowed by the plough. By
this process the substratum of clay is thrown up, to a
considerable thickness, upon the light, black, almost
volatile soil, and mixed with it when dry ; thus giving
it a new character and capacity of production.

Everything seems to grow on a Californian scale in
this fen district. Although the soil thus rescued from
the waters that had flooded and half dissolved it, was
at first as deep, black, and naturally fertile as that of
our prairies, those who commenced its cultivation did
not make the same mistake as did our Western farmers.
They did not throw their manure into the broad drain-
ing canals to get rid of it, trusting to the inexhaustible
fertility of the alluvial earth, as did the wheat growers
of Indiana and Illinois to their cost ; but they hus-
banded and well applied all the resources of their barn-

194 ^ Walk from

yards. In consequence of this economy, there is no
deterioration of annual averages of their crops to be
recorded, as in some of our prairie States, which have
been boasting of the natural and inexhaustible fertility
of their soil even with the record of retrograde statistics
before their eyes. The grain and root crops are very
heavy ; and a large business is done in growing turnip
seed for the world in some sections of this fen country.
A large proportion of the quantity we import comes
from these low lands.

Our host of the Four-Hundred- Acre Farm took us
over his productive occupation, which was in a very
high state of cultivation. The wheat was yellowing to
harvest, and promised a yield of 42 bushels to the acre.
The oats were very heavy, and the root crops looked
well, especially a field of mangel-wurzel. He appor-
tions his land to different crops after this ratio : Wheat,
120 acres ; oats, 80 ; rye-grass and clover, 50 ; roots, 60.
His live stock consisted of 300 sheep, 50 to 60 head of
cattle, and 70 to 80 hogs. His working force was from
10 to 12 men, 14 farm horses, and 4 nags. It may
interest some of my American readers to know the
number, character, and cost of the implements em-
ployed by this substantial English farmer in culti-
vating an estate of 400 acres. I noted down the
following list, when he was showing us his tool house :

London .to John O 1 Groat's. 195

$ c. $ c.

6 Ploughs, at 4 each =19 20 .. 24=11520

6 Horse-carts, ,,14 67 20 . . 84 , 403 20

1 Large Iron Roller and Gearing, 13

1 Cambridge Eoller, 14

1 Twelve-Coulter Drill, 46

3 Harrows.. , 3 . ,,1440 9

2 Great Harrows 3 14 40 . . 6

62 40
67 20
220 80
43 20

28 80

Total cost of Implements 196 $940 80

These figures will represent the working forces and
implemental machinery of a well-tilled farm of 400
acres in England. They will also indicate the amount
of capital required to cultivate an estate of this extent
here. Let us compare it with the amount generally
invested in New England for a farm of equal size.
Thousands that have been under cultivation for a hundred
years, may be bought for 5, or $25, per acre, including
house, barn, and other buildings and appurtenances.
It is a very rare thing for a man with us to buy 400
acres at once ; but if he did, it would probably be on
these conditions : He would pay 400, or 2,000, down
at the time of the purchase, giving his notes for the
remaining 1,600 or $8,000, at 6 per cent, interest
payable annually, together with the yearly instalment
of principal specified in each note. He would perhaps
have 200, or $1,000, left of his capital for working
power and agricultural implements. He would pro-
bably divide it after the following manner :
o 2

196 A Walk from

*

2 Yokes of oxen at 20 = 40 = 250

1 Horse 20 100

2 Ox-carts at 15 30 150

1 Waggon 20 100

2 Ox-sleds at 1 2 10

2 Ox-ploughs at ,,2 4 20

1 Single horse-plough 1 5

2 Harrows 2 4 20

Cradles, scythes, hoes, rakes, flails, &c. . . 4 20

Fanning-mill,hay-cutter,andcorn-sheller 4 20

15 Cows, steers, and heifers 45 225

6 Shoats, or pigs six months old 10 50

These figures would indicate a large operation for a
practical New England farmer, who should undertake
to purchase and cultivate an estate of 400 acres. In-
deed, not one in a hundred buying such a large tract
of land would think of purchasing all the implements
on this list at once, or entirely new. One of his carts,
sleds, and harrows would very probably be "second-
handed," and bought at half the price of a new one.
Thus, a substantial farmer with us would think he
was beginning on a very satisfactory and liberal foot-
ing, if he had 200, or $1,000, in ready money for
stocking a holding of 400 acres with working cattle
and implemental machinery, cows, pigs, &c. Now,
compare this outlay with that of our host of the
Four-Hundred-Acre Farm in Lincolnshire. We will
begin with his

London to John O' Groat's. 197

*

14 Farm horses, at the low figure of 20 each = 280 = 1,400

4 Nags, or saddle and carriage horses . . 20 80 400

300 Stock sheep 1 ,,300 1,500

70 Pigs, of different ages 2 ,,140 700

50 Head of cattle (cows, bullocks, &c.) .. 12 600 3,000
Carts, drills, rollers, harrows, ploughs and other

implements 200 1,000

1,600 $8,000

The average rent of such land in England must be
at least 1 10s. per acre, and the tenant farmer must
pay half of this out of the capital he begins with,
which, on 400 acres, would amount to 300. Then,
if he buys a quantity of artificial manures equal to the
value of 10s. per acre, he will need to expend in this
department 200. Next, if he purchases corn and
oil-cake at the same ratio for his cattle and sheep as
that adopted by Mr. Jonas, of Chrishall Grange, he will
want 1,000 for his live stock of all kinds. In addi-
tion to these items of expenditure, he must pay his
men weekly ; and the wages of ten, at 10s. per week,
for six months, amount to 130. Add an economical
allowance for family expenses for the same length of
time, and for incidental outgoes, and you make up the
aggregate of 4,000, which is 10 to the acre, which
an English farmer needs to have and invest on entering
upon the cultivation of a farm, great or small. This
amount, as has been stated elsewhere, is the rule for
successful agriculture in this country.

198 A Walk from

These facts will measure the difference between the
amounts of capital invested in equal spaces of land in
England and America. It is as ten to one, assuming
a moderate average. Here a man would need 1,500,
or more than $7,000, to begin with on renting a farm
of 150 acres, in order to cultivate it successfully. In
New England, a man would think he began under
favorable auspices if he were able to enter upon the
occupancy of equal extent with 100, or about $500.

On returning from the Fens, I passed the night and
most of the following day at Woodhurst, a village a
few miles north of St. Ive's, on the upland rising
gently from the valley of the Ouse. My host here
was a farmer owning the land he tilled, cultivating
it and the moral character and happiness of the little
community, in which he moved as a father, with an
equally generous heart and hand, and reaping a liberal
reward from both departments of his labor. He
took me over his fields and showed me his crops and
live stock, which were in excellent condition. Harvest-
ing had already commenced, and the reapers were at
work, men and women, cutting wheat and barley.
Few of them used sickles, but a curved knife, wider
than the sickle, of nearly the same shape, minus the
teeth. A man generally uses two of them. With the
one in his left hand he gathers in a good sweep of

London to John O Groat's. 199

grain, bends it downward, and with the other strikes it
close to the ground, as we cut Indian corn. With the
left-hand hook and arm, he carries on the grain from
the inside to the outside of the swath or " work,"
making three or four strokes with the cutting knife ;
then, at the end, gathers it all up and lays it down
in a heap for binding. This operation is called
" bagging." It does not do the work so neatly as the
sickle, and is apt to pull up many stalks by the roots
with the earth attaching to them, especially at the last,
outside stroke.

I was struck with the economy adopted by my host in
loading, carting and stacking or ricking his grain. The
operation was really performed like clockwork. Two or
three men were stationed at the rick to unload the carts,
two in the fields to load them, and several boys to lead
them back and forth to the two parties. They were all
one-horse carts, and so timed that a loaded one was
always at the rick and an empty one always in the field ;
thus keeping the men at both ends fully employed from
morning until night, pitching on and pitching off;
while boys, at 6d. or 8d. a day, led the horses.

On passing through the stables and housings for
stock, I noticed a simple, yet ingenious contrivance for
watering cattle, which I am not sure I can describe
accurately enough, without a drawing, to convey a

200 A Walk from

tangible idea of it to my agricultural neighbors in
America. It may be called the buoy-cock. In the first
place, the water is brought into a cistern placed at one
end of the stable or shed at a sufficient elevation to give
it the necessary fall in all the directions in which it is
to be conducted. The pipe used for each cow-box or
manger connects each with the cistern, and the distri-
buting end of it rests upon, or is suspended over, the
trough assigned to each animal. About one-third of
this trough, which was here a cast-iron box, about
twelve inches deep and wide, protrudes through the
boarding of the stable. In this outside compartment
is placed a hollow copper ball attached to a lever, which
turns the axle or pivot of the cock. Now, this little
buoy, of course, rises and falls with the water in the
trough. When the trough is full, the buoy rises and
raises the lever so as to shut off the water entirely. At
every sip the animal takes, the buoy descends and lets
on again, to a drop, a quantity equal to that abstracted
from the inside compartment. Thus the trough is
always kept full of pure water, without losing a drop of
it through a waste-pipe or overflow. Where a great
herd of cattle and a drove of horses have to be supplied
from a deep well, as in the case of Mr. Jonas, at Chris-
hall Grange, this buoy-cock must save a great amount
of labor.

London to John O Groat's. 201

I saw also here in perfection that garden allotment
system which is now coming widely into vogue in
England, not only adjoining large towns like Bir-
mingham, but around small villages in the rural
districts. It is well worthy of being introduced in
New England and other states, where it would work
equally well in various lines of influence. A land-
owner divides up a field into allotments, each generally
containing a rood, and lets them to the mechanics,
tradespeople and agricultural laborers of the town or
village, who have no gardens of their own for the
growth of vegetables. Each of these is better than a
savings'-bank to the occupant. He not only deposits
his odd pennies but his odd hours in it ; keeping both
away from the public-house, or from places and habits
of idleness and dissipation. The days of Spring and
Summer here are very long, and a man can see to work
in the field as early as three o'clock in the morning,
and as late as nine at night. So every journeyman
blacksmith, baker or shoemaker may easily find four or
five hours in the twenty-four for work on his allotment,
after having completed the task or time due to his em-
ployer. He generally keeps a pig, and is on the qui rive
to make and collect all the manure he can for his little
farm. A field of several acres, thus divided and culti-
vated in allotments, presents as striking a combination

2O2 A Walk from

of colors as an Axminster carpet. As every rood is
subdivided into a great variety of vegetables, and
as forty or fifty of such patches, lying side by side,
present, in one coup d'ceil, all the alternations of which
these crops and colors are susceptible, the effect is very
picturesque.

My Woodhurst friend makes his allotment system a
source of much social enjoyment to himself and the
poor villagers. He lets forty-seven patches, each con-
taining twenty poles. Every tenant pays 10s., or
$2 40c., annual rent for his little holding, Mr. E.
drawing the manure for each, which is always one good
load a year. Here, too, these little spade-farmers are
put under the same regime as the great tenant agricul-
turists of the country. Each must farm his allotment
according to the terms of the yearly lease. He must
dig up his land with spade or pick, not plough it ; and
he is not allowed to work on it upon the Sabbath.
But encouragements greatly predominate over restric-
tions, and stimulate and reward a high cultivation.
Eight prizes are offered to this end, of the following
amounts : 10s., 7s. 6d., 5s., 4s., 3s., 2s. 6d., 2s. and
Is. Every one who competes must not have more
than half his allotment in potatoes. The greater the
variety of vegetables the other half contains, the better
is his chance for the first prize. The appraiser is some

London to John G 1 Groat's.

203

disinterested person of good judgment, perhaps from an
adjoining town, who knows none of the competitors.
To prevent any possible favoriteism, the allotments are
all numbered, and he awards prizes to numbers only,
not knowing to whom they belong. Another feature,
illustrating the generous disposition of the proprietor,
characterises this good work. On the evening appointed
for paying the rents, he gets up a regular, old-fashioned
English supper of roast beef and plum-pudding for
them, giving each fourpence instead of beer, so that
they may all go home sober as well as cheerful. To
see him preside at that table, with his large, round,
rosy face beaming upon them with the quiet benevo-
lence of a good heart, and to hear the fatherly and
neighborly talks he makes to them, would be a picture
and preaching which might be commended to the
farmers of all countries.

I saw also a curious phenomenon in the natural
world on this farm, which perhaps will be regarded as
a fiction of fancy by many a reader. It was a large
field of barley grown from oats ! We have recently
dwelt upon some of the co-workings of Nature and Art
in the development of flowers and of several useful
plants But here is something stranger still, that seems
to diverge from the line of any law hitherto known in
the vegetable world. Still, for aught one can know ;it

2O4 A Walk from

this stage of its action, it may be the same general law
of development which we have noticed, only carried
forward to a more advanced point of progress. I would
commend it to the deep and serious study of naturalists,
botanists, or to those philosophers who should preside
over the department of investigation to which the sub-
ject legitimately belongs. I will only say what I saw
with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. Here,
I repeat, was a large field of heavy grain, ready for
harvest. The head and berry were barley, and the
stalk and leaves were oat ! Here, certainly, is a mys-
tery. The barley sown on this field was the first-born
offspring of oats. And the whole process by which
this wonderful transformation is wrought, is simply
this, and nothing more : The oats are sown about the
last week in June ; and, before coming into ear, they
are cut down within one inch and a half of the ground.
This operation is repeated a second time. They are
then allowed to stand through the winter, and the fol-
lowing season the produce is barley. This is the plain
statement of the case in the very words of the originator
of this process, and of this strange transmutation. The
only practical result of it which he claims is this : that
the straw of the barley thus produced is stouter, and
stands more erect, and therefore less liable to be beaten
down by heavy wind or rain. Then, perhaps, it may

London to John O 1 Groat's.

205

be added, this oat straw headed with barley is more
valuable as fodder for live stock than the natural barley
straw. But the value of this result is nothing com-
pared with the issue of the experiment as proving the
existence of a principle or law hitherto undiscovered,
which may be applied to all kinds of plants for the use
of man and beast. If any English reader of these
Notes is disposed to inquire more fully into this sub-
ject, I am sure he may apply without hesitation to
Mr. John Ekins, of Bruntisham, near St. Ives, who
will supply any additional information needed. He
presented me with a little sample bag of this oat-born
barley, which I hope to show my agricultural neighbors
on returning to America.

206 A Walk from

CHAPTEE XI.

THE MILLER OF HOUGHTON 'AN HOUR IN HUNTINGDON OLD HOUSES

WHITEWASHED TAPESTRY AND WORKS OF ART "THE OLD MERMAID"

AND "THE GREEN MAN" TALK WITH AGRICULTURAL LABORERS
THOUGHTS ON THEIR CONDITION, PROSPECTS, AND POSSIBILITIES.

AFTEE a little more than a week's visit in St. Ives
and neighboring villages, I again resumed my
staff and set out in a westerly direction, in order to
avoid the flat country which lay immediately north-
ward for a hundred miles and more. Followed the
north bank of the Ouse to Huntingdon. On the way,
I stopped and dined with a gentleman in Houghton
whose hospitality and good works are well known to
many Americans. The locality mentioned is so identi-
fied with his name, that they will understand whom I
mean. There was a good and tender-hearted man who
lived in our Boston, called Deacon Grant ; and I hope
he is living still. He was so kind to everybody in
trouble, and everybody in trouble went to him so
spontaneously for sympathy and relief, that no one
ever thought of him as belonging to a single religious
congregation, but regarded him as Deacon of the
whole of Boston a kind of universal father, whose

London to John O' Groat's. 207

only children were the orphans and the poor men's sons
and daughters of the city. The Miller of Houghton,
as some of my readers well know, is just such another
man, with one slight difference, which is to his advan-
tage, as a gift of grace. He has all of Deacon Grant's
self-diffusing life of love for his kind, generous and
tender dispositions towards the poor and needy, and
more than the Deacon's means of doing good, and, with
all this, the indomitable energy and will and even the
look of Cromwell. During my stay in the neighbor-
hood, I was present at two large gatherings at his
House of Canvass, with which he supplements his
family mansion when the latter lacks the capacity of
his heart in the way of accommodation. This tent,
which he erects on his lawn, will hold a large congre-
gation ; and, on both the occasions to which I refer,
was well filled with men, women, and children from far
and near. The first was a reunion of the Sunday-
school teachers and pupils of the county, to whom he
gave a sumptuous dinner ; after which followed addresses
and some business transactions of the association. The
second was the examination of the British School of the
village, founded and supported, I believe, by himself.
At the conclusion of the exercises, which were exceed-
ingly interesting, the whole company, young and old,
adjourned to the lawn, where the visitors and elder

208 A Walk from

people of the place were served with tea and coffee
under the tent.

Then came "The Children's Hour." They were
called in from their games and romping on the lawn,
and formed into a circle of about 50 feet diameter.
And here and now commenced an entertainment which
would make a more interesting picture than the old
Apsley House Dinner. The good deacon of the
county, with several assistants, entered this charmed
circle of boys and girls, all with eyes dilated and eager
with expectation, and overlooked by a circular wall of
elder people radiant with the spirit of the moment.
The host, in his white hat and grey beard, led the way
with a basket on his arm filled with little cakes, called
with us ginger-nuts. He was followed by a file of
other men with baskets of nuts, apples, &c. It was
a most hilarious scene, exhiliarating to all the senses
to look upon, either for young or old. He walked
around the ring with a grand, Cromwellean step, sow-
ing a pattering rain of the little cakes on the clean-
shaven lawn, as a farmer would sow wheat in his field,
broadcast, in liberal handfuls. Then followed in their
order the nut-sowers, apple-sowers, and the sowers of
other goodies. When the baskets were emptied, the
circular ppace enclosed was well covered with as tempt-
ing a spread of dainties as ever fascinated the eyes of a

London to John O 1 Groat's. 209

crowd of little people. For a whole minute, longer
than a full hour of ordinary schoolboy enjoyments, they
had to stand facing that sight, involuntarily attitu-
dinising for the plunge. At the end of that long
minute, the signal sounded, and, in an instant, there
was a scene in the ring that would have made the
soberest octogenarian shake his sides with the laughter
of his youth. The encircling multitude of youngsters
darted upon the thickly scattered delicacies like a flock
of birds upon a field of grain, with patter, twitter and
nutter, and a tremor and treble of little short laughs ;
small, eager hands trying in vain to shut fast upon a
large apple and several ginger-nuts at one grasp ; slip-
pings and trippings, tousling of tresses and crushing
of dresses ; boys and girls higgledy-piggledy ; caps and
bonnets piggledy-higgledy ; little red-faced Alexanders
looking half sad, because they had filled their small
pocket-worlds and both hands with apples and nuts,
and had no room nor holding for more ; little girls,
with broken bonnet-strings, and long, sunny hair
dancing over their eyes, stretching their short fingers
to grasp another goodie, all this, with the merry
excitement of fathers and mothers, elder brothers and
sisters, and other spectators, made it a scene of
youthful life and delight which would test the genius
of the best painter of the age to delineate. And

2io A Walk from

Sir Roger Coverley Cromwell, the author of all this
entertainment, would make a capital figure in the
group, taken just as he looked at that moment, with
his face illuminated with the upshooting joy of his
heart, like the clear, frosty sky of winter with the
glow and the flush of the Northern Lights.

This good Miller of Houghton, having added stone
to stone until his mills can grind all the wheat the
largest county can grow, has recently handed over to
his sons the great business he had built up to such
magnitude, and retired, if possible, to a more active
life of benevolence. One of his late benefactions was
a gift of 3,000, or nearly $15,000, toward the
erection of an Independent Chapel in St. Ives.

At Huntingdon, I took tea and spent a pleasant
hour with the principal of a select school, kept in a
large, dignified and comfortable mansion, once occu-
pied by the poet Cowper. In the yard behind the
house there is a wide-spreading and prolific pear-tree
planted by his hands. This, too, was one of the
thousands of old, stately dwellings you meet with
here and there, which have no beginning nor end that
you can get at. Cowper lived and wrote in this, for
instance ; but who lived in it a century before he was
born ? Who built it ? Which of the Two Eoses did
he mount on his arms? Or did he live and build

London to John O 'Groat's. 211

later, and dine his townsman, the great Oliver, or was
he loyal to the last to Charles the First ? These are
questions that come up, on going over such a build-
ing, but no one can answer them, and you are left
to the wisdom of limping legends on the subject.
The present occupant has an antiquarian penchant; so,
a short time after he took possession of the house, he
began to make explorations in the walls and wains-
cottings, as men of the same mind have done at
Nineveh and Pompeii. Having penetrated a thick
surface of white lava, or a layer of lime, put on with a
brush "in an earlier age than ours," he came upon a
gorgeous wall of tapestry, with inwoven figures and
histories of great men and women, quite as large as
life, and all of very florid complexion and luxurious
costumes. He has already exhumed a great many
square yards of this picturesque fabric, wrought in
by-gone ages, and is continuing the work with all
the zest and success of a fortunate archaeologist. Now
it is altogether probable, that Cowper, as he sat in
one of those rooms writing at his beautiful rhymes,
had not the slightest idea that he was surrounded by
such a crowd of kings, queens, and other great person-
ages, barely concealed behind a thin cloud of white-
wash.

It may possibly be true, that a few beautiful, fair-
p 2

212 A Walk from

haired heretics in love or religion have been stone -
masoned up alive in the walls of abbeys or convents.
Sir Walter Scott leaned to that belief, and perhaps
had credible history for it. But if the trowel has
slain its thousands, the whitewash swab has slain its
ten thousands of innocents. Think of the furlongs
of richly-wrought tapestry, full of sacred and profane
history, and the furlongs of curiously-carved panels,
wainscotting, and cornice that floppy, sloppy, vandal
brush of pigs' bristles and pail of diluted lime have
eclipsed and obliterated forever, and not a retributive
drop of the villainous mixture has fallen into the
perpetrator's eye to " make his foul intent seem
horrible ! " Think of Christian kings of glorious
memory, even Defenders of the Faith, with their fair
queens, princes of the blood, and knights, noble and
brave, all, in one still St. Bartholomew night of that
soft, thin, white flood, buried from the sight of the
living as completely as the Roman sentinel at his
post by the red gulf-stream of Vesuvius ! Still, we
must not be too hard on these seemingly barbarous
transactions. "Not in anger, not in wrath," nor in
foolish fancy, was that dripping brush always lifted
upon these works of art. Many a person of cultivated
taste saw a time when he could say, almost with
Sancho Panza, " blessings on the man who invented

London to John O 1 Groat's.

21

whitewash ! It covers a tapestry, a carving, or a
sculpture all over like a blanket;" like that one spoken
of in Macbeth. England is just beginning to learn
what treasures of art in old mansions, churches and
cathedrals were saved to the present age by a timely
application of that cheap and healthy fluid. For
there was a time when stern men of iron will arose,
who had no fear of Grothic architecture, French
tapestry, or Italian sculpture before their eyes ; who
treated things that had awed or dazzled the world as
" baubles " of vanity, to be put away, as King Josiah
put away from his realm the graven images of his pre-
decessors. And these men thought they were doing
good service to religion by pushing their bayonets
at the most delicate works of the needle, pencil and
chisel ; ripping and slitting the most elaborately
wrought tapestry, stabbing off the fine leaf and
vine-work from carved cornices and wainscotting, and
mutilating the marble lace-work of the sculptor in
the old cathedrals. The only way to save these
choice things was to make them suddenly take the
white veil from the whitewasher's brush. Thousands
of them were thus preserved, and they are now being
brought forth to the light again, after having been
shut away from the eye of man for several centuries.
The school-house is still standing in Huntingdon,

214 -A Walk from

in good condition and busy occupation, in which
Oliver Cromwell stormed the English alphabet and
carried the first parallel of monosyllables at the point
of the pen. The very form or bench of oak from
which he mounted the breach is still occupied by
boys of the same size and age, with the same number
of inches between their feet and the floor which
separated it from his. Had the photographic art
been discovered in his day, we might have had his
face and form as he looked when seated as a rosy-
faced, light-haired boy in the rank and file of the
youngsters gathered within those walls. What an
overwhelming revelation it would have been to his
young, honest and merry mind, if some seer, like
him who told Hazael his future, could have given
him a sudden glimpse of what he was to be and do
in his middle manhood !

After tea, I continued my walk westward to a
small, quiet, comfortable village, about five miles
from Huntingdon, where I became the guest of " The
Old Mermaid," who extended her amphibious hospi-
talities to all strangers wishing bed and board for
the night. Both I received readily and greatly
enjoyed under her roof, especially the former. Never
did I occupy a bed so fringed with the fanciful
artistries of dreamland. It was close up under the

London to John O 1 Groat's. 215

thatched roof, and it was the most easy and natural
thing in the world for the fancies of the midnight
hour to turn that thatching into hair, and to cheat
my willing mind with the delusion that I was sleep-
ing with the long, soft tresses of Her Submarine
Ladyship wound around my head. It was a delight-
ful vagary of the imagination, which the morning
light, looking in through the little checker-work
window, gently dispelled.

The next day I bent my course in a northwesterly
direction, and passed through a very fertile and
beautiful section. The scenery was truly delightful ;
not grand nor splendid, but replete with quiet
pictures that please the eye and touch the heart
with a sense of gladness. The soft mosaic work of
the gently rounded hills, or figures wrought in wheat,
barley, oats, beans, turnips, and meadow and pasture
land, and grouped into landscapes in endless alterna-
tion of lights and shades, and all this happy little
world now veiled by the low, summer clouds, now
flooded by a sunburst between them all these lovely
and changing sceneries made my walk like one
through a continuous gallery of paintings.

Harvesting had commenced in real earnest, and
the wheatfields were full of reapers, some wielding
the sickle, others the scythe. When I saw men and

216 A Walk from

women bending almost double to cut their sheaves
close to the ground, I longed to walk through a
barley-field with one of our American cradles, and
show them how we do that sort of thing. As yet
I have seen no reaping machines in operation, and
I doubt if they will ever come into such extensive
use here as with us, owing to the abundance of
cheap labor in this country. I saw on this day's
walk the heaviest crop of wheat that I have noticed
since I left London. It must have averaged sixty
bushels to the acre for the whole field.

Late in the afternoon it began to rain ; and I was
glad to find shelter and entertainment at a comfort-
able village inn, under the patronage of " The Green
Man," perhaps a brother or near relative of Mermadam
my hostess that entertained me the preceding night.
It was a unique old building, or rather a concrete of
a great variety of buildings devoted to a remarkable
diversity of purposes, including brewing, farming and
other occupations. The large, low, dark kitchen was
flanked by one of the old-fashioned fire-places, with
space for a large family between the jambs, and the
hollow of the chimney ample enough to show one of
the smaller constellations at the top of it in a clear
night. A seat on the brick or stone floor before one
of these kitchen fire-places is to me the focus of the

London to John O Groat's. 217

home comforts of the house, and I always make for
it mechanically. As the darkness drew on, several
agricultural laborers drifted in, one after the other,
until the broad, deep pavement of the hearth was lined
by a row of them, quite fresh from their work. They
were quiet, sober-looking men, and they spoke with
subdued voices, without animation or excitement, as
if the fatigue of the day and the general battle of
life had softened them to a serious, pensive mood
and movement. As they sat drying their jackets
around the fire, passing successive mugs of the land-
lord's ale from one to the other, they grew more and
more conversational ; and, as I put in a question here
and there, they gave me an insight into the general
condition, aspects and prospects of their class which
I had not obtained before. They were quite free
to answer any questions relating to their domestic
economy, their earnings, spendings, food, drink, cloth-
ing, housing and fuel, also in reference to their edu-
cational and religious privileges and habits.

It was now the first week of harvest ; and harvest
in England, in any one locality, covers the space of
a full month, in ordinary weather. Then, as the
season varies remarkably, so that one county is fre-
quently a week earlier in harvesting than that adjoining
it on the north, the work for the sickle is often pro-

2 1 8 A Walk from

longed from the middle of July to the middle of Sep-
tember. This is the period of great expectation as well
as toil for the agricultural laborers. Every man, woman,
and boy of them all is put under the stimulus of extra
earnings through these important weeks. Even the
laborers hired by the year have a full month given
them for harvesting forty or fifty extra shillings under
this stimulus. Nearly all the grain in England is cut
for a certain stipulated sum per acre ; and thousands
of all ages, with sickle or scythe in hand, see the sun
rise and set while they are at work in the field. In
the field they generally breakfast, lunch and dine ;
and when it is considered that there is daylight enough
for labor between half-past three in the morning to
half-past eight at night, one may easily see how many
of the twenty-four hours they may bend to their toil.
The price for cutting and binding wheat is from 10s.
to 14s., or from $2 40c. to $3 36c. per acre, and 8s., or
$1 92c. per acre for oats and barley. The men who
cut, bind and shock by the acre generally have to find
their own beer, and will earn from 24s. to 28s., or from
$5 76c. to $6 72c. per week. The regular laborers
frequently let themselves to their employers during the
harvest month at from 20s. to 24s. per week, which
is just about double their usual wages. In addition
to this pay, they are often allowed two quarts of ale and

London to John O Croat's. 219

two quarts of small beer per day ; not the small beer
of New England, made only of hops, ginger and
molasses ; but a far more stimulating drink, quite
equal to our German lager. This gallon of ale and
beer will cost the farmer about 10d., or twenty cents.
Where the piece-work laborer furnishes his own malt
liquor, it must cost him on an average about an
English shilling, or twenty-four cents, a day.

Two or three of the men, who formed the circle
around the fire at The Green Man's, had come to
purchase, or pay for, a keg of beer for their harvest
allowance. It was to me a matter of half-painful
interest to see what vital importance they attached
to a supply of this stimulant to see how much more
they leaned upon its strength and comfort than upon
food. It was not in my heart to argue the question
with them, or to seek to dispel the hereditary and
pleasant illusion, that beer alone, of all human drinks,
could carry them through the long, hot hours of toil
in harvest. Besides, I wished to get at their own
free thoughts on the subject without putting my
own in opposition to them, which might have slightly
restricted their full expression. Every one of them
held to the belief, as put beyond all doubt or question
by the experience of the present and all past gene-
rations, that wheat, barley and oats could not be

220 A Walk from

reaped and ricked without beer, and beer at the
rate of a gallon a day per head. Each had his
string of proofs to this conviction terminating in a
pewter mug, just as some poor people praying to the
Yirgin have a string of beads ending in a crucifix,
which they tell off with honest hearts and sober
faces. Each could make it stand to reason that a
man could not bear the heat and burden of harvest
labor without beer. Each had his illustration in
the case of some poor fellow who had tried the
experiment, out of principle or economy, and had
failed under it. It was of no use to talk of tempe-
rance and all that. It was all very nice for well-
to-do people, who never blistered their hands at a
sickle or scythe, to tell poor, laboring men, sweating
at their hot and heavy work from sun to sun, that
they must not drink anything but milk and water
or cold tea and coffee, but put them in the wheat-field
a few days, and let them try their wishy-washy drinks
and see what would become of them. As I have
said, I did not undertake to argue the men out of
this belief, partly because I wished to learn from
them all they thought and felt on the subject, and
partly, I must confess, because I was reluctant to
lay a hard hand upon a source of comfort which, to
them, holds a large portion of their earthly enjoy-

London to John O? Groat's. 221

ments, especially when I could not replace it with a
substitute which they would accept and which would
yield them an equal amount of satisfaction.

A personal habit becomes a " second nature " to
the individual, even if he stands alone in its indul-
gence. But when it is an almost universal habit,
coming down from generation to generation, throwing
its creepers and clingers around the social customs
and industrial economies of a great nation, it is
almost like re-creating a world to change that second
nature thus strengthened. This change is slowly
working its way in Great Britain slowly, but percep-
tibly here and there thanks to the faithful and
persevering efforts put forth by good and true men,
to enlighten the subjects of this impoverishing and
demoralising custom, which has ruled with such
despotism over the laborers of the land. Little by
little the proper balance between the Four Great
Powers of human necessity, Food, Drink, Raiment
and Housing, so long disturbed by this habit, is
being restored. Still, the preponderance of Drink,
especially among the agricultural laborers in England,
is very striking and sad. As a whole, Beer must
still stand before Bread even before Meat, and before
both in many cases, in their expenditures. The man
who sat next me, in muddy leggings, and smoking

222 A Walk from

ooat, was mildly-spoken, quiet and seemingly thought-
ful. He had come for his harvest allowance of 20s.
worth of beer. If he abstained from its use on
Sundays, he would have a ration of about tenpence's
worth daily. That would buy him a large loaf of
bread, two good cuts of mutton or beef, and all the
potatoes and other vegetables he could eat in a day.
But he puts it all into the Jug instead of the Basket.
Jug is the juggernaut that crushes his hard earnings in
the dust, or, without the figure, distils them into
drink. Jug swallows up the first fruits of his
industry, and leaves Basket to glean among the
sharpest thorns of his poverty. Jug is capricious
as well as capacious. It clamors for quality as well
as quantity ; it is greedy of foaming and beaded
liquors. Basket does well if it can bring to the
reaper the food of well-kept dogs. In visiting
different farms, I have noticed men and women at
their luncheons and dinners in the field. A hot
mutton chop, or a cut of roast-beef, and a hot potatoe,
seem to be a luxury they never think of in the
hardest toil of harvest. Both the meals I have
mentioned consist, so far as I have seen, of only two
articles of food, bread and bacon, or bread and cheese.
And this bacon is never warm, but laid upon a slice
of bread in a thin, cold layer, instead of butter, both

London to John O 1 Groat's. 223

being cut down through with a jack-knife into morsels
when eaten.

Such is a habit that devours a lion's share of the
English laborer's earnings, and leaves Food, Raiment
and Housing to shift for themselves. If he works by
the piece and finds his own beer, it costs him more
than he pays for house rent, or for bread, or meat, or
for clothes for himself and family. If his employer
furnishes it or pays him commutation money, it amounts
for all his men to a tax of half-a-crown to the acre for

his whole farm. There is no earthly reason why agri-
cultural laborers in this country should spend more in
drink than those of New England. I am confident
that if a census were taken of all the " hired men " of
our six states, and a fair average struck, the daily
expenditure for drinks would not exceed 2d., or 4 cents
per head, while their average wages would amount to
4s., or 96 cents, per day through the year. Yet our
summers are far hotter and dryer than in England, our
labor equally hard, and there is really more natural
occasion for drinks in our harvest-fields than here. It
would require a severe apprenticeship for our men to
acquire a taste for sharp ale or strong beer as a beverage
under our July sun. A pail or jug of sweetened water,
perhaps with a few drops of cider to the pint, to sour it
slightly, and a spoonful of ginger stirred in, is our

224 A Walk from

substitute for malt liquor. Sometimes beer made of
nothing but hops, water, and a little molasses, is
brought into the field, and makes even an exhiliarating
drink, without any alcoholic effect. Cold coffee, diluted
with water, and re-sweetened, is a healthful and grate-
ful luxury to our farm laborers.

It would be a blessed thing for all the outdoor and
indoor laborers in this country, if the broad chasm
between the strong beer of Old England and the small
beer of New England could be bridged, and they be
carried across to the shore of a better habit. The farm
hands here need a good deal of gentle leading and
suggestion in this matter. If some humane and in-
genious man would get up a new, cheap, cold drink,
which should be nutritious, palatable and exhiliarating,
without any inebriating property, it would be a boon
of immeasurable value. Malt liquors are made in such
rivers here, or rather in such lakes with river outlets ;
there is such a system for their distribution and circu-
lation through every town, village, and hamlet; and
they are so temptingly and conveniently kegged,
bottled and jugged, and so handy to be carried out
into the field, that the habit of drinking them is almost
forced upon the poor man's lips. If a cheaper drink,
refreshing and strengthening, could be made equally
convenient and attractive, it would greatly help to

London to John O 1 Groat's. 225

break this hereditary thraldom to the Beer-Barrel.
Another powerful auxiliary to this good work might
be contributed in the form of a simple contrivance,
which any man of mechanical genius and a kind heart
might elaborate. In this go-ahead age, scores of things
are made portable that once were fast-anchored solidi-
ties. We have portable houses, portable beds, portable
stoves and cooking ranges, as well as portable steam-
engines. Now, if some benevolent and ingenious
man would get up a little portable affair, at the cost
of two or three shillings, especially, for agricultural
laborers in this country, which they could carry with
one hand into the field, and by which they could make
and keep hot a pot of coffee, cocoa, chocolate, broth or
porridge, and also bake a piece of meat and a few
potatoes, it would be a real benefaction to thousands,
and help them up to the high road of a better
condition.

What is the best condition to which the agricultural
laborers in Great Britain may ever expect to attain,
or to which they may be raised by that benevolent
effort now put forth for their elevation ? They may
all be taught to read and write and do a little in the
first three rules of arithmetic. That will raise them
to a new status and condition. Education of the
masses has become such a vigorous idea with the

226 A Walk from

Grovernment and people of England ; so much is doing
to make the children of the manufacturing districts
pass through the school-room into the factory, carry-
ing with them the ability and taste for reading ;
ragged-schools, working-men's clubs, and institutions
for all kinds of cheap learning and gratuitous teaching
are multiplying so rapidly; the press is turning out
such a world of literature for the homes of the poor,
and the English Post, like a beneficent Providence,
is distilling such a morning dew of manuscript and
printed thoughts over the whole length and breadth
of the country, and all these streams of elevating
influence are now so tending towards the agricultural
laborers, that there is good reason to believe the next
generation, of them will stand head and shoulders
above any preceding one in the stature of intelligence
and self-respect. This in itself will give them a new
status in society, as beneficial to their employers as
to themselves. It will increase their mutual respect,
and create a better footing for their relationships.

But the first improvement demanded in their con-
dition, and the most pressingly urgent, is a more
comfortable, decent and healthy housing. Until this
is effected, all other efforts to raise them mentally and
morally must fail of their expected result. The
London Times, and other metropolitan, and many local,

London to John O Groat's. 227

journals publish almost daily distressing accounts of
the miserable tenements occupied by the men and
women whose labor makes England the garden of
fertility and beauty that it is. Editors are making
the subject the theme of able and stirring articles,
and some of the most eloquent members of Parliament
are speaking of it with great power. It is not only
generous but just to take the language in which the
writers and orators of a country denounce the evils
existing in it cum grano sails, or with considerable
allowance for exaggeration. Their statements and
denunciations should not be used against their country
as a reproach by the people of another, because they
prove an earnest desire and effort to reform abuses
which grew up in an unenlightened past. As a speci-
men of the language which is sometimes held on this
subject, I subjoin the following paragraph from the
Saturday Review, perhaps the most cynical or unsenti-
mental journal in England :

" There is a wailing for the dirt and vice and misery
which must prevail in houses where seven or eight
persons, of both sexes and all ages, are penned up
together for the night in the one rickety, foul, vermin-
hunted bed-room. The picture of agricultural life
unrolls itself before us as it is painted by those who
know it best. We see the dull, clouded mind, the
a 2

228 A Walk from

bovine gaze, the brutality and recklessness, and the
simple audacity, and the confessed hatred of his
betters, which mark the English peasant, unless
some happy fortune has saved him from the general
lot, and persuaded him that life has something besides
beer that the poor man may have and may relish."

Now this is a sad picture truly. The pen is sharp
and cuts like a knife, but it is the surgeon's knife,
not the poisoned barb of a foreigner's taunt. This is
the hopeful and promising aspect of these delineations
and denunciations of the laboring man's condition.
That low, damp, ill-ventilated, contracted room in
which he pens his family at night, was, quite likely,
constructed in the days of Grood Queen Bess, or when
" Greorge the Third was King," at the latest. And
houses were built for good, substantial farmers in
those days which they would hardly house their
horses in noAv. There are hundreds of mechanics
and day-laborers in Edinburgh who pen their fami-
lies nightly in 'apartments once owned and occupied
by Scotch dukes and earls, but which a journeyman
shoe-maker of New England would be loth to live
in rent free. Even the favorite room of Queen
Mary, in Holyrood Palace, in which she was wont
to tea and talk with Bizzio, would be too small and
dim for the shop-parlor of a small London trades-

London to John O' Groat's. 229

man of the present day. Thus, after all, the low-
jointed, low-floored, small- windowed, ill- ventilated cot-
tages now occupied by the agricultural laborers of
England were proportionately as good as the houses
built at the same period for the farmers of the coun-
try, many of which are occupied by farmers now, and
the like of which never could be erected again on this
island. Indeed, one wonders at finding so many of
these old farm houses still inhabited by well-to-do
people, who could well afford to live in better buildings.
This, then, is a hopeful sign, and both pledge and
proof of progress that the very cottages of laboring
men in England that once figured so poetically in
the histories and pictures of rural life, are now being
turned inside out to the scrutiny of a more en-
lightened and benevolent age, revealing conditions
that stir up the whole community to painful sensi-
bility and to vigorous efforts to improve them. These
cottages were just as low, damp, small and dirty
thirty years ago as they are now, and the families
" penned " in them at night were doubtless as large,
and perhaps more ignorant than those which inhabit
them at the present time. It is not the real difference
between the actual conditions of the two periods, but
the difference in the dispositions and perceptions of
the public mind, that has produced these humane

230 A Walk from

sensibilities and efforts for the elevation of the
ploughers, sowers, reapers and mowers who enrich
and beautify this favored land with their patient and
poorly-paid labor. And there is no doubt that these
newly-awakened sentiments and benevolent activities
will carry the day; replacing the present tenements
of the agricultural laborers with comfortable, well-
built cottages, fitted for the homes of intelligent and
virtuous families. This work has commenced in
different sections under favorable auspices. Build-
ings have been erected on an estate here and there
which will be likely to serve as models for whole
hamlets of new tenements. From what I have heard,
I should think that Lord Overstone, of the great bank-
ing house of the Lloyds, has produced the best models
for cottage homes, on his estates in Northamptonshire.
Although built after the most modern and improved
plan, and capacious enough to accommodate a con-
siderable family very comfortably, almost elegantly,
the yearly rent is only 3, or less than fifteen dollars !
Now with a three-pound cottage, having a parlor,
kitchen, bedroom and buttery on the lower floor, and
an equal number of apartments on the upper; with a
forty-rod garden to grow his vegetables, and with a
free school for his children at easy walking distance,
the agricultural laborer in England will be placed as far

London to John G 1 Groat's. 231

forward on the road of improvement as the Govern-
ment or people, or both, can set him. The rest of the
way upward and onward he must make by his own
industry, virtue and economy. From this point he
must work out his own progress and elevation. No
Government, nor any benevolent association, nor general
nor private benevolence, can regulate the rate of his
wages. The labor market will determine that, just as
the Corn Exchange does the price of wheat. But there
is one thing he can do to raise himself in civil stature,
moral growth and domestic comfort. He may empty
the Jug into the Basket. He and his family may
consume in solids what they now do in frothy fluids.
They may exchange their scanty dinner of cold bacon
and bread for one of roast beef and plum pudding,
by substituting cold coffee, cocoa or pure water for
strong beer. Or, if they are content to go on with
their old fare of food, they may save the money they
expended in ale for the rent of one or two acres of
land, for a cow, or for two or three pigs, or deposit it
weekly in the Post-Office Savings' Bank, until it shall
amount to a sum sufficient to enable them to set up
a little independent business of their own.

Here, then, are three great steps indispensable for
the elevation of the agricultural laborers of Great
Britain to the highest level in society which they can

232 A Walk from

reach and maintain. Two of these the Government,
or the landowners, or both, must take. They are
Improved Dwellings and Free and Accessible Educa-
tion. These the laborer cannot provide for himself
and family. It is utterly beyond his ability to do it.
The third, last, long step must depend entirely upon
himself; though he may be helped on by sympathy,
suggestion, and encouragement from those who know
how hard a thing it is for the fixed appetites to break
through the meshes of habit. He must make Drink
the cheapest of human necessities. He must exchange
Beer for Bread, for clothes, for books, or for things
that give permanent comfort and enjoyment. When
these three steps are accomplished, the British laborer
will stand before his country in the best position it
can give him. And I believe it will be a position
wliich will make him contented and happy, and be
satisfactory to all classes of the people.

After all that can be done for them, the wages of
the agricultural laborers of Great Britain cannot be
expected to exceed, on an average, twelve shillings a
week, or about half the price of the same labor in
America. Their rent and clothes cost them perhaps
less than half the sum paid by our farm hands for the
same items of expenditure. Their food must also cost
only about half of what our men pay, who would think

London to John Cf Groat's.

233

they were poor indeed if they could not have hot
meat breakfasts, roast or boiled beef dinners and cold
meat suppers, with the usual sprinkling of puddings,
pies and cakes, and tea sweetened with loaf sugar.
Thus, after all, put the English laborer in the position
suggested ; give him such a three-pound cottage and
garden as Lord Overstone provides ; give his children
free and convenient schooling; then let him exchange
his ale for nutritious and almost costless drinks, and
if he is still able to live for a few years on his old
food-fare, he may work his way up to a very comfort-
able condition with his twelve shillings a week, besides
his beer-money. On these conditions he would be able
almost to run neck and neck with our hired men in
the matter of saving money " for a rainy day," or for
raising himself to a higher position.

We will put them side by side, after the suggested
improvements have been realised; assuming each has
a wife, with two children too young to earn anything
at field work.

American Laborer at 24s. per week.
Weekly Expense for S c. s. d.

Food 3 50 = 14 7

For Rent and Taxes 67 29
For Fuel, average of

the year 048,, 20

For Clothes 1 00 42

Total Weekly Ex- -

penses So 65 = 23 6

English do. at 12s.

Weekly Expense s. d. $ c.

for Food 7 3 = 1 75

For Rent 12 28

Fuel 1 24

Clothes 2 1 50

Total Weekly Ex-

penses 110=277

234 A Walk from

I think the American reader, who is personally
acquainted with the habits and domestic economy of
our farm laborers, will regard this estimate of their
expenditures as quite moderate. I have assumed, in
both cases, that no time is lost in the week on account
of sickness, or of weather, or lack of employment ; and
all the incidental expenses I have included in the four
general items given. It must also be conceded that
our farm hands do not average more than 24 English
shillings, or $5 76c., per week, through all the seasons
of the year. The amount of expenditure allowed in
the foregoing estimate enables them to support them-
selves and their families comfortably, if they are tem-
perate and industrious ; to clothe and educate their
children ; to make bright and pleasant homes, with well-
spread tables, and to have respectable seats in church
on the sabbath. On the other hand, we have assigned
to the English agricultural laborer what he would
regard a proportionately comfortable allowance for the
wants of a week. We may not have divided it cor-
rectly, but the total of the items is as great as he would
expect to expend on the current necessities of seven
days. I doubt if one in a thousand of the farm
laborers of Great Britain lays out more than the sum
we have allotted for one week's food, rent, and fuel
and clothes. We then reach this result of the balance-

London to John O* Groat's. 235

sheet of the two men. Their weekly savings hardly
differ by a penny ; each amounting to about 5d., or
10 cents. At first sight, it might seem, from this
result, that the English farm laborer earns half as
much, lives half as well, and saves as much as the
American. But he has a resource for increasing
his weekly savings which his American competitor
would work his fingers to the bone before he would
employ. His wife is able and willing to go with him
into the field and earn from three to five shillings a
week. Then, if he commutes with his employer, he
will receive from him 4d. daily, or 2s. a week, for beer-
money. This, if he and his wife are willing to live, as
such families do now, on bread, bacon and cheese, and
such vegetables as they can grow in their garden, they
may lay up, from their joint earnings, a dollar, or four
shillings a week, provided a sufficiently stimulating
object be set before them. To me it is surprising that
they sustain so much human life on such small means.
They are often reproached for their want of wise
economy ; but never was more keen ingenuity, more
close balancing of pennies against provisions than a
great many of them practice and teach. Let the
most astute or utilitarian of social economists try the
experiment of housing, feeding and clothing himself,
wife and six children too young to earn anything, on

236 A Walk from

ten or twelve shillings a week, and he will learn some-
thing that his philosophy never dreamed of.

Even while bending under the weight of the beer-
barrel, thousands of agricultural laborers in England
have accomplished wonders by their indefatigable in-
dustry, integrity and economy. Put a future before
them with a sun in it- some object they may reach
that is worth a life's effort, and as large a proportion
of them will work for it as you will find in any other
country. A servant girl told me recently that her
father was a Devonshire laborer, who worked the best
years of his life for seven shillings a week, and her
mother for three, when they had half a dozen children
to feed and clothe, Yet, by that unflagging industry
and ingenious economy with which thousands wrestle
with the necessities of such a life and throw them
too, they put saving to saving, until they were able to
rent an acre of orcharding, a large garden for vege-
tables, then buy a donkey and cart, then a pony and
cart, and load and drive them both to market with
their own and their neighbors' produce, starting from
home at two in the morning. In a few years they
were able to open a little grocery and provision shop,
and are now taking their rank among the tradespeople
of the village. But if the farm servants of England
could only be induced to give up beer and lay by the

London to John O 1 Groat's. 237

money paid them as a substitute, it alone would raise
them to a new condition of comfort, even independence.
At 4d. a day commutation money, they would have
each 5 at the end of the year. That would pay the
rent of two acres of land here ; or it would buy five on
the Illinois Central Railroad. Three years' beer-money
would pay for those rich prairie acres, his fare by sea
and land to them, and leave him 3 in his pocket to
begin their cultivation with. Three years' of this
saving would make almost a new man of him at home,
in the way of self-respect, comfort and progress. It
would be " a nest-egg," to which hope, habit and a
strengthening ambition would add others of larger size
and value from year to year.

Give, then, the British agricultural laborer good,
healthy Housing, Free Schooling, and let him empty
the Jug into the Basket, and he may work his way up
to a very comfortable condition at home. But if he
should prefer to go to Australia or America, where
land is cheap and labor dear, in a few years he may
save enough to take him to either continent, with suffi-
cient left in his pocket to begin life in a new world.

8 A Walk from

CHAPTEE XII.

FARM GAME HALLET WHEAT OUNDLE COUNTRY BRIDGES FOTHERmG-

HAY CASTLE QUEEN MARY'S IMPRISONMENT AND EXECUTION

BURGHLEY HOUSE : THE PARK, AVENUES, ELMS AND OAKS

THOUGHTS ON TREES, ENGLISH AND AMERICAN.

HAYINGr now pursued a westerly direction until
I was in the range of a continuous upland
section of country, I took a northward course and
walked on to Oundle, a goodly town in Northampton-
shire, as unique as its name. On the way, in crossing
over to another turnpike road, I passed through a
large tract of land in a very deshabille condition, rough,
boggy and bushy. I soon found that it was a game-
growing estate, and very productive of all sorts of
birds and small quadrupeds. The fields I crossed
showed a promising crop of hares and rabbits ; and
doubtless there were more partridges on that square
mile than in the whole state of Connecticut. This is
a characteristic of the country which will strike an
American, at his first visit, with wonder. He will
see hares and rabbits bobbing about on common
farms, and partridges in broods, like separate flocks of
hens and chickens in fields of grain, within a stone's

London to John O'Groafs. 239

throw of the farmer's house. I doubt if any county
in New England produces so many in a year as the
holding of Mr. Samuel Jonas already described. Rab-
bits have been put out of the pale of protection some-
what recently, I believe, and branded with the bad
name of vermin; so that the tenant farmer may kill
them on his occupation without leave or license from
the landlord. It may indicate their number to state
the fact, that one hundred and twenty-five head of
them were killed in one day's shooting on Mr. Jonas's
estate by his sons and some of their friends.

It was market day in Oundle, and I had the plea-
sure of sitting down to dinner with a large company of
farmers, and cattle and corndealers. They were intel-
ligent, substantial-looking men, with no occupational
peculiarity of dress or language to distinguish them
from ordinary middle-class gentlemen engaged in trade
or manufacture. Indeed, the old-fashioned English
farmer, of the great, round, purply-red face, aldermanio
stature, and costume of fifty years ago, speaking, the
dialect of his county with such inimitable accent, is
fast going out. I have not seen one during my pre-
sent sojourn in England. I fear he has disappeared
altogether with the old stage-coach, and that we have
not pictures enough of him left to give the rising
generation any correct notion of what he was, and how

240 A Walk from

he looked. It may be a proper and utilitarian change,
but one can hardly notice without regret what trans-
formations the railway regime has wrought in customs
and habits which once individualised a country and
people. A kind of French centralisation in the world
of fashion has been established, which has overridden
and obliterated all the dress-boundaries of civilised
nations. All the upper and middle classes of Chris-
tendom centre themselves to one focus of taste and
merge into one plastic commonwealth, to be shaped
and moulded virtually by a common tailor. Their coats,
vests, pantaloons, boots and shoes are made substan-
tially after the same pattern. For a while, hats stood
out with some show of pluck and patriotism, and
made a stand for national individuality, but it was
in vain. They, too, succumbed to the inexorable law
of Uniformity. That law was liberal in one respect.
It did not insist that the stove-pipe form should rule
inflexibly. It admitted several variations, including
wide-awakes, pliable felts, and that little, squat, lack-
a-daisical, round-crowned, narrow-brimmed thing worn
by the Prince of Wales in the photographs taken
of him and the Princess at Sandringham. But this
has come to be the rule : that hats shall no longer
represent distinct nationalities ; that they shall be
interchangeable in all civilised communities ; in a

London to John O 'Groat's. 241

word, that neither Englishman, American, French
nor German shall be known by his hat, whatever be
the form or material of its body or brim. If there
were a southern county in England where the mer-
cury stood at 100 degrees in the shade for two or three
summer months, the upper classes in it would don,
without any hesitation, the wide, flappy broadbrims
of California, and still be in the fashion, that is,
variety in uniformity. The peasantry, or the lowest
laboring classes of European countries, are now, and
will remain perhaps for a century to come, the only
conservators of the distinctive national costumes of
bygone generations.

During the conversation at the table, a farmer
exhibited a head of the Hallett wheat, which he had
grown on his land. I never saw anything to equal it,
in any country in which I have travelled. It was
nearly six inches in length, and seeded large and
plump from top to bottom. This is a variety pro-
duced by Mr. Hallett, of Brighton, and is creating no
little interest among English grain-growers. Lord
Burghley, who had tested its properties, thus de-
scribes it, in a speech before the Northamptonshire
Agricultural Society last summer :

" At the Battersea Show last year, my attention
was called to some enormous ears of wheat, which I

242 A Walk from

thought could not have been grown in England. For,
although the British farmer can grow corn with any
one, I had never seen such wheat here, and thought
it must be foreign wheat. I went to the person who
was threshing some out, and having been informed
that it was sown only with one seed in a hole, I pro-
cured some of Mr. Hallett, of Brighton ; and, being
anxious to try the system, I planted it according to
Mr. Hallett's directions one grain in a hole, the holes
nine and a half inches apart, with six inches between
the rows. To satisfy myself on the subject, I also
planted some according to Stephen's instructions, who
said three grains in a hole would produce the most
profitable return. I also planted some two grains in a
hole. I sowed the grain at the end of last September,
on bad land, over an old quarry, and except some stiff
clay at the bottom of it, there was nothing in it good
for wheat. The other day I counted the stalks of all
three. On Mr. Stephen's plan of three grains in a
hole, there were eighteen stalks ; with two grains in a
hole, there was about the same number ; but with one
seed in a hole, the lowest number of stalks was sixteen,
and the highest twenty-two. I planted only about half
an acre as a trial, and when I left home a few days
since, it looked as much like eight quarters (sixty-four
bushels) to the acre as any I have seen. The ears

London to John O* Groat's, 243

are something enormous. I would certainly recom-
mend every farmer to make his own experiments, for if
it succeeds, it will prove a great economy of seed ; and
drills to distribute it fairly are to be had."

Truly one of Hallett's wheat ears might displace the
old cornucopia in that picture of happy abundance so
familiar to old and young. Here are twenty ears from
one seed, containing probably a thousand grains. The
increase of a thousand-fold, or half that ratio, is pro-
digious, having nothing to equal it in the vegetable
world that we know of. If one bushel of seed wheat
could be so distributed by a drill as to produce 500 or
250 bushels at the harvest, certainly the staff of life
would be greatly cheapened to the millions who lean
upon it alone for subsistence.

From Oundle I walked the next day to Stamford, a
good, solid, old English town, sitting on the corners of
three counties, and on three layers of history, Saxon,
Dane and Norman. The first object of interest was a
stone bridge over the Nen at Oundle. It is a grand
structure to span such a little river. It must have
cost three times as much as "The Great Bridge"
over the Connecticut at Hartford ; and yet the stream
it crosses is a mere rivulet compared with our New
England river. " The bridge with wooden piers "
is a fabric of fancy to most English people. They
u :_>

244- ^ Walk from

have read of such a thing in Longfellow's poems,
but hardly realise that it exists still in civilised
countries. Here bridges are works of art as well as
of utility, and rank next to the grand old cathedrals
and parish churches for solidity and symmetry. Their
stone arches are frequently turned with a grace as
fine as any in St. Paul's, and their balustrades and
hutments often approach the domain of sculpture.

Crossing the Nen, I followed it for several miles
in a northerly direction. I soon came to a rather
low, level section of the road, and noticed stones placed
at the side of it, at narrow intervals, for a long distance
to the very foot of a village situated on a rising ground.
These stones were evidently taken from some ancient
edifice, for many of them bore the marks of the old
cathedral or castle chisel. They were the foot-tracks
of a ruined monument of dark and painful history.
More than this might be said of them. They were the
blood-drops of a monstrosity chased from its den and
hunted down by the people, that shuddered with horror
at its sanguinary record of violence and wrong. As I
approached the quiet village, whose pleasant-faced
houses, great and small, looked like a congregation of
old and young sitting reverently around the parish
church and listening to the preaching of the belfry, I
saw where these stones came from. There, on that

London to John O* Groat's. 245

green, ridgy slope, where the lambs lay in the sun by
the river, these stones, and a million more scattered
hither and thither, once stood in walls high, hideous
and wrathful, for half a dozen centuries and more. If
the breathings of human woe, if the midnight misery
of wretched, broken hearts, could have penetrated these
stones, one might almost fancy that they would have
sweat with human histories in the ditch where they
lay, and discolored the puddles they bridged with the
bitter distilment of grief centuries old. On that gentle
rising from the little Xen stood Fotheringay Castle.
That central depression among the softl}*-carpeted
ridges marks the site of the donjon huge and horrid,
where many a knight and lady of noble blood was
pinioned or penned in darkness and hopeless duress
centuries before the unfortunate Mary was born. There
nearly half the sad years of her young life and beauty
were prisoned. There she pined in the sickness of hope
deferred, in the corroding anguish of dread uncertainty,
for a space as wide as that between the baptismal font
and presentation at Elizabeth's court. There she laid
her white neck upon the block. There fell the broad
axe of Elizabeth's envy, fear and hate. There fell the
fair-haired head that once gilded a crown and wore all
the glory of regal courts still beautiful in the setting
light of farewell thoughts.

246 A Walk from

-It may be truly said of Fotheringay Castle, that
not one stone is left upon another to mark its founda-
tions. Not Fleet-street Prison, nor the Bastile itself,
went out under a heavier weight of popular odium.
Although public sentiment, as well as the personal
taste and interest of their proprietors, has favored the
preservation of the ruins of old castles and abbeys in
Grreat Britain, Fotheringay bore, branded deep in its
forehead, the mark of Cain, and every man's hand, of
the last generation, seemed to have been turned against
it. It has not only been demolished, but the debris
have been scattered far and wide, and devoted to uses
which they scarcely honor. You will see the well-
faced stones for miles around, in garden walls, pave-
ments, cottage hearths and chimneys, in stables and
cow-houses. In Oundle, the principal hotel, a large
castellated building, shows its whole front built of
them.

The great lion of Stamford is the Burghley House,
the palace of the Marquis of Exeter. It may be
called so without exaggeration of its magnificence
as a building or of the extent and grandeur of its
surroundings. The edifice itself would cut up into
nearly half a dozen "White Houses," such as we
install our American Presidents in at Washington.
Certainly, in any point of view, it is large and

London to John C? Groat's. 247

splendid enough for the res dmce of an emperor and
his suite. Its towers, turrets and spires present a
picturesque grove of architecture of different ages,
and its windows, it is said, equal in number all the
days of the year. It was not open to the public
the day I was in Stamford, so I could only walk
around it and estimate its interior by its external
grandeur.

But there was an outside world of architecture in
the park of sublimer features to me than even the
great palace itself, with all its ornate and elaborate
sculpture. It was the architecture of the majestic elms
and oaks that stood in long ranks and folded their
hands, high up in the blue sky, above the finely-
gravelled walks that radiated outward in different
directions. They all wore the angles and arches of the
Gothic order and the imperial belt of several centuries.
I walked down one long avenue and counted them on
either side. There were not sixty on both ; yet their
green and graceful roofage reached a full third of
a mile. Not sixty to pillar and turn such an arch
as that ! I sat down on a seat at the end to think
of it. There was a morning service going on in this
Cathedral of Nature. The dew-moistened, foliated
arches so lofty, so interwebbed with wavy, waky
spangles of sky, were all set to the music of the

248 A Walk from

anthem. " The street musicians of the heavenly
city " were singing one of its happiest hymns out of
their mellow throats. The long and lofty orchestra
was full of them. Their twittering treble shook the
leaves with its breath, as it filtered down and flooded
the temple below. Beautiful is this building of God !
Beautiful and blessed are these morning singing-birds
of His praise ! Amen !

But do not go yet. No ; I will not. Here is the
only book I carry with me on this walk a Hebrew
Psalter, stowed away in my knapsack. I will open it
here and now, and the first words my eye lights upon
shall be a text for a few thoughts on this scene and
scenery. And here they are, seemingly not apposite
to this line of reflection, yet running parallel to
it very closely:

The best English that can be given of these words
we have in our translation : " Blessed is he who, pass-
ing through the valley of Baca, maketh it a well."
Why so ? On what ground ? If a man had settled
down in that valley for life, there would have been no
merit in his making it a well. It might, in that case,
have been an act of lean-hearted selfishness on his part.
Further than this, a man might have done it who could

London to John O 1 Groat's. 249

have had the heart to wall it in from the reach of thirsty
travellers. No such man was meant in the blessing ;
nor any man resident in or near the valley. It was he
who was " passing through " it, and who stopped, not
to search for a dribbling vein of water to satisfy his
own momentary thirst, but to make a well, broad and
deep, after the oriental circumference, at which all
future travellers that way might drink with gladness.
That was the man on whom the blessing rested as a
condition, not as a wish. Look at the word, and get the
right meaning of it. It is *ntt?N, not 7j:n3 ; it is a
blessedness, not a benediction. It means a permanent
reality of happiness, like that of Obededom, not a cheap
"thank you!" or "the Lord bless you!" from here
and there a man or woman who appreciates the bene-
faction.

And he deserves the same who, " passing through "
the short years of man's life here on earth, plants trees,
like the living, lofty columns of this long cathedral
aisle. How unselfish and generous is this gift to
coming generations ! How inestimable in its value
and surpassing the worth of wealth ! surpassing the
measurement of gold and silver ! From my seat here,
I look up to the magnificent frontage of that baronial
palace. I see its towers, turrets and minarets ; its
grand and sculptured gateways and portals through

250 A Walk from

this long, leaf-arched aisle. Not forty, but nearer four
hundred years, doubtless, was that pile in building.
Architecture of the pre-Norman period, and of all
subsequent or cognate orders, diversifies the tastes and
shapings of the structure. Suppose the whole should
take fire to-night and burn to the ground. The
wealth of the owner could command genius, skill and
labor enough to rebuild it in three years, perhaps in
one. The Czar of all the Russias did as large a thing
once as this last, in the reconstruction of a palace.
Perhaps the building is insured for its positive value,
and the insurance money would erect a better one.
But lift an axe upon that tall centurion of these
templed elms. Cut through the closely-grained rings
that register each succeeding year of two centuries.
Hear the peculiar sounding of the heart strokes, when
the lofty, well-poised structure is balancing itself, and
quivering through every fibre and leaf and twig on the
few unsevered tendons that have not yet felt the keen
edge of the woodman's steel. See the first leaning it
cannot recover. Hear the first cracking of the central
vertebra ; then the mournful, moaning whir in the
air ; then the tremendous crash upon the green earth ;
the vibration of the mighty trunk on the ground,
like the writhing and tremor of an ox struck by
the butcher's axe ; the rebound into the air of dis-

London to John C? Groat's. 251

membered branches ; the frightened flight of leaves (
and dust, and all the other distractions of that hour
of death and destruction. Look upon that ruin ! The
wealth, genius and labor that could build a hundred
Windsor Castles, and rebuild all the cathedrals of
England in a decade, could not rebuild in two centuries
that elm to the life and stature you levelled to the dust
in two hours.

Put, then, the man who plants trees for posterity
with him who, "passing through the valley of Baca,
maketh it a well." Put him under the same blessing of
his kind, for he deserves it. He gives them the richest
earthly gift that a man can give to a coming gene-
ration. In a practical sense, he gives them time. He
gives them a whole century, as an extra. If they
would pay a gold sovereign for every solid inch of oak,
they could not hire one built to the stature of one of
these trees in less than two centuries' time, though
they dug about it and nursed it as the man did the
vine in Scripture. Blessed be the builders of these
living temples of Nature ! Blessed be the man, rich or
poor, old or young, especially the old, who sets his
heart and hand to this cheap but sublime and priceless
architecture.

Let connoisseurs who have seen Memphis, Nineveh,
Athens, Eome, or any or all of the great cities of

252 A Walk from

the East, ancient or modern, come and sit here, and
look at this lofty corridor, and mark the orders and
graces of its architecture. What did the Ptolemies,
their predecessors or successors in Egypt, or sovereigns
of Chaldaic names, in Assyria, or ambitious builders
in the ages of Pericles or Augustus, in Greece or
Rome ? Their structures were the wonders of the
world. Mighty men they were, whose will was law,
whose subjects worked it out to its wildest impulse
without a murmer or a reward. But who built this
sixty-columned temple, and bent these lofty arches ?
Two or three centuries ago, two men in coarse garb,
and, it may be, in wooden shoes, came here with a
donkey, bearing on its back a bundle of little elms,
each of a finger's girth. They came with the rude
pick and spade of that time ; and, in the first six
working hours of the day, they dug thirty holes
on this side of the aisle, and planted in them half
the tiny trees of their bundle. Then they sat down
at noon to their bread and cheese and, most likely,
a mug of ale, and talked of small, home matters, just
as if they were dibbling in a small patch of wheat or
potatoes. Then they went to work again and planted
the other row ; and, as the sun was going down,
they straightened their backs, and, with hands stayed
upon their hips, looked up and down the two lines

London to John O' Groat's. 253

and thought they would pass muster and please the
master. Then they shouldered their brightened tools
and went home to their low, dark cottages, discussing
the prices of bread, beer and bacon, and whether the
likes of them could manage to keep a pig and make
a little meat in the year for themselves.

That is the story of this most magnificent structure
to which you look up with such admiration. Those
two men in smock frocks, each with a pocket full of
bread and cheese, were the Michael Angelos of this
lofty St. Peter's. That donkey, with its worn panniers,
was the only witness and helper of their work. And
it was the work of a day ! They may have been
paid two English shillings for it. The little trees
may have cost two shillings more, if taken from
another estate. The donkey's day was worth six-
pence. 0, wooden-shoed Ptolemies ! what a clay's
work was that for the world ! They thought nothing
of it nothing more than they would of transplanting
sixty cabbages. They most likely did the same thing
the next day, and for most of the days of that year,
and of the next year, until all these undulating acres
were planted with trees of every kind that could grow
in these latitudes. How cheap, but priceless, is the
gift of such trees to mankind ! What a wealth, what
a glory of them can even a poor, laboring man give to

254 A Walk, from

a coming generation ! They are the most generous
crops ever sown by human hands. All others the
sower reaps and garners into his own personal enjoy-
ment ; but this yields its best harvest to those who
come after him. This is a seeding for posterity.
From this well of Baca shall they draw the cooling
luxury of the gift when the hands that made it shall
have gone to dust.

And this is a good place and time to think of home
of what we begin to hear called by her younger
children, Old New England. Trees with us have
passed through the two periods specified by Solomon
" a time to plant and a time to pluck up." The
last came first and lasted for a century. Trees were
the natural enemies to the first settlers, and ranked
in their estimation with the wild Indians, wolves and
bears. It was their first, great business to cut them
down, both great and small. Forests fell before the
woodman's axe. It made clean work, and seldom
spared an oak or an elm. But, at the end of a
century, the people relented and felt their mistake.
Then commenced " the time to plant ;" first in and
around cities like Boston, Hartford and New Haven,
then about villages and private homesteads. Tree-
planting for use and ornament marks and measures
the footsteps of our civilization. The present genera-

A Walk from 255

tion is reaping a full reward of this gift to the next.
Every village now is coming to be embowered in this
green legacy to the future ; like a young mother
decorating a Christmas-tree for her children. Towns
two hundred years old are taking the names of this
diversified architecture, and they glory in the title.
New Haven, with a college second to none on the
American Continent, loves to be called "The Elm.
City," before any other name. This generous and
elevating taste is making its way from ocean to ocean,
even marking the sites of towns and villages before
they are built. I believe there is an act of the
Connecticut Legislature now in force, which allows
every farmer a certain sum of money for every tree
he plants along the public roadside of his fields. The
object of this is to line all the highways of the State
with ornamental trees, so that each shall be a well-
shaded avenue. What a gift to another generation
that simple act is intended to make ! What a world
of wonder and delight will our little State be to
European travellers and tourists of the next century,
if this measure shall be carried out ! If a few miles
of such avenues as Burghley park and Chatsworth
present, command such admiration, what sentiments
would a continuous avenue of trees of equal size
from Hartford to New Haven, inspire !

256 A Walk from

While on this line of reflection, I will mention a
case of monumental tree-planting in New England,
not very widely known there. A small town, in the
heart of Massachusetts, was stirred to the liveliest
emotion, with all the rest in her borders, by the Decla-
ration of Independence in 1776. Different communi-
ties expressed their sense of the importance of this event
in different ways, most of which were noisy and excited.
But the good people of this rural parish came together,
and, at a happy suggestion from some one of their
number, agreed to spend the day in planting trees to
commemorate the momentous transaction. They forth-
with set to work, young and old, and planted first a
double row on each side of the walk from the main
road up " The Green " to their church door ; then a
row on each side of the public highway passing through
the village, for nearly a mile in each direction. There
was a blessed day's work for them, their children and
children's children. Every hand that wielded a spade,
or held up a treelet until its roots were covered with
earth, has long since lost its cunning ; but the tall,
green monuments they erected to the memory of the
most momentous day in American history, stand in
unbroken ranks, the glory of the village.

Although America will never equal England, pro-
bably, in compact and picturesque "plantations," or

London to John O 1 Groat's. 257

"woods," covering hundreds of acres, all planted by
hand, our shade-trees will outnumber hers, and surpass
them in picturesque distribution and arrangement, when
our popular programme is fully carried out. In two
or three important particulars, we have a considerable
advantage over this- country in respect to this tasteful
embellishment. In the first place, all the farmers in
America own the lands they cultivate, and, on an
average, two sides of every farm front upon a public
road. Two or three days' work suffices for planting a
row of trees the whole length of this frontage, or the
roadside of the farmer's fence or wall. This is being
done more and more extensively from year to year,
generally under the influence of public taste and custom,
and sometimes under the stimulus of governmental com-
pensation, as in Connecticut. Thus, in the life of the
present generation, all our main roads and cross-roads
may become arched and shaded avenues, giving the
whole landscape of the country an aspect which no
other land will present.

Then we have another great advantage which England
can never attain until she learns how to consume her coal
smoke. Our wood and anthracite fires make no smoke to
retard the growth or blacken the foliage of our trees.
Thus we may have them in standing armies, tall and
green, lining the streets, and overtopping the houses of

258 A Walk from

our largest cities ; filtering with their wholesome leafage
the air breathed by the people. New Haven and Cleve-
land are good specimens of beautifully-shaded towns.

There is a third circumstance in our favor as yet,
and of no little value. The grand old English oak
and elm are magnificent trees, in park or hedgerow
here. The horse-chestnut, lime, beech and ash grow
to a size that you will not see in America. The Spanish
chestnut, a larger and coarser tree than our American,
reaches an enormous girth and spread. The pines,
larches and firs abound. Then there are tree-hunters
exploring all the continents, and bringing new species
from Japan and other antipodean countries. But as
yet, our maples have never been introduced ; and with-
out these the tree-world of any country must ever lack
a beautiful feature, both in spring, summer and autumn,
especially in the latter. Our autumnal scenery, with-
out the maple, would be like the play of Hamlet with
Hamlet left out ; or like a royal court without a queen.
Few Americans, even loudest in its praise, realise how
much of the glory of our Indian summer landscape is
shed upon it by this single tree. At all the Flower
Shows I have seen in England and France, I havo
never beheld a bouquet so glorious and beautiful as a
little islet in a small pellucid lake in Maine, filled to
the brim, and rounded up like a foil-blown rose, with

London to John O* Groat's. 259

firs, larches, white birches and soft maples, with a little
sprinkling of the sumach. An early frost had touched
the group with every tint of the rainbow, and there
it stood in the ruddy glow of the Indian summer, look-
ing at its face in the liquid mirror that smiled, still as
glass, under its feet.

I was much pleased to notice what honor was put
upon one of our humble and despised trees in Burghley
House park, as in the grounds of other noblemen.
There was not one that spread such delicate and
graceful tresses on the breeze as our White Birch ;
not one that fanned it with such a gentle, musical
flutter of silver-lined leaves ; not one that wore a
boddice of such virgin white from head to foot, or
that showed such long, tapering fingers against the
sky. I was glad to see such justice done to a tree in
the noblest parks in England which with us has been
treated with such disdain and contumely. When I
saw it here in such glory and honor, and thought
how, notwithstanding its Caucasian complexion, it is
regarded as a nuisance in our woods, meadows and
pastures, so that any man who owns, or can borrow
an axe, may cut it down without leave or license
wherever he finds it when I saw this disparity in its
status in the two Englands, I resolved to plead its
cause in my own with new zeal and fidelity.
s 2

260 A Walk from

CHAPTER XIII.

WALK TO OAKHAM THE ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SPRING THE ENGLISH

GENTRY A SPECIMEN OF THE CLASS MELTON MOWBRAY AND ITS

SPECIALITIES BELVOIR VALE AND ITS BEAUTY THOUGHTS ON THE

BLIND PAINTER.

T.1EOM Stamford to Oakham was an afternoon walk
_|_ which I greatly enjoyed. This was the first
week of harvest, and the first of August. How won-
derfully the seasons are localised and subdivided !
How diversified is the economy of light and heat !
That field of wheat, thick, tall and ripe for the sickle,
was green and apparently growing through all the
months of last winter. What a phenomenon would
it have been, on the first of February last, to a New
England farmer, suddenly transported from his snow-
buried hills to the view of this landscape the same day !
Not a spire of grass or grain was alive when he left
his own homestead. All was cold and dead. The
very earth was frozen to the solidity and sound of
granite. It was a relief to his eye to see the snow
fall upon the scene and hide it two feet deep for
months. He looks upon this, then upon the one he

London to John O 1 Groat's. 261

left behind. This looks full of luxuriant life, as green
as his in May. It has three months' start of his dead
and buried crop. He walks across it ; his shoes sink
almost to the instep in the soft soil. He sees birds
hopping about in it without overcoats. Surely, he says
to himself, this is a favored land. Here it lies on the
latitudes of Labrador, and yet its midwinter fields are
as green as ours in the last month of spring. At this
rate the farmers here must harvest their wheat before the
ears of mine are formed. But he counts without Nature.
The American sun overtakes and distances the English
by a full month. Here is the compensation for six
consecutive months in which the New England farmer
must house his plough and not turn a furrow.

Doubtless, as much light and heat brighten and
warm one country as the other in the aggregate of
a year. But there is a great difference in the economy
of distribution. In England, the sun spreads its
warmth more evenly over the four seasons of the
year. What it witholds from Summer it gives to
Winter, and makes it wear the face of Spring through
its shortest and coldest days. But then Spring loses
a little from this equalising dispensation. It is not
the resurrection from death and the grave as it is in
America. Children are not waiting here at the
sepulchre of the season, as with us, watching and listening

262 A Walk from

for its little Bluebird angel to warble from the first
budding tree top, "It is risen!" They do not come
running home with happy eyes, dancing for joy, and
shouting through the half-open door, "0, mother,
Spring has come ! We've heard the Bluebird !
Hurrah ! Spring has come ! We saw the Phebce
on the top of the saw-mill ! " Here Spring makes
no sensation ; takes no sudden leap into the seat of
Winter, but comes in gently, like the law of primo-
geniture or the British Constitution. It is slow and
decorous in its movements. It is conservative, treats
its predecessor with much deference, and makes no
sudden and radical changes in the face of things. It
comes in with no Lord Mayor's Day, and blows no*
trumpets, and bends no triumphal arches to grace its
entree. Few new voices in the tree-tops hail its advent.
No choirs of tree-toads fiddle in the fens. No congre-
gation of frogs at twilight gather to the green edges
of the unfettered pond to sing their Old Hundred,
led by venerable Signer Cronker, in his bright, buskin
doublet, mounted on a floating stump, and beating
time with a bulrush. No Shad-spirits with invisi-
ble wings, perform their undulating vespers in the
heavens, to let the fishermen know that it is time
to look to their nets. Even the hens of the farm-
yard cackle with no new tone of hope and aninia-

London to John O 'Groat's. 263

tion at the birth of the English Spring. The fact
is, it is a baby three months old when it is
baptised. It is really born at Christmas instead
of Easter, and makes no more stir in the family
circle of the seasons than any familiar face would
at a farmer's table.

In a utilitarian point of view, it is certainly an
immense advantage to all classes in this country, that
Nature has tempered her climates to it in this kindly
way. I will not run off upon that line of reflection
here, but will make it the subject of a few thoughts
somewhere this side of John 0' Groats. But what
England gains over us in the practical, she loses in the
poetical, in this ecpnomy of the seasons. Her Spring
does not thrill like a sudden revelation, as with us.
It does not come out like the new moon, hanging its
delicate silver crescent in the western pathway of the
setting sun, which everybody tries to see first over the
right shoulder, for the very luck of the coincidence.
Still, both countries should be contented and happy
under this dispensation of Nature. The balance is
very satisfactory, and well suited to the character and
habits of the two peoples. The Americans are more
radical and sensational than the English ; more given
to sudden changes and stirring events. Sterne
generally gets the credit of saying that pretty thought

264 A Walk from

first, " Providence tempers the wind to the shorn lamb."
A French writer puts it the other way, and more practi-
cally : " Providence tempers the wool of the lamb to the
wind." This is far better and more natural. But
it may be truly said that Providence tempers the seasons
to the temperaments and customs of the two nations.

Just before reaching Oakham, I passed a grand
mansion, standing far back from the turnpike road,
on a commanding eminence, flanked with extensive
plantations. The wide avenue leading to it looked a
full mile in length. Lawns and lakes, which mirrored
the trees with equal distinctness, suffused the landscape
of the park like evening smiles of Nature. It was
indeed a goodly heritage for one man ; and he only
mounted a plain Mr. to his name, although I learned
that he could count his farms by the dozen. I was
told that the annual dinner given to his tenant farmers
came off the previous day at the inn where I lodged.
A sumptuous banquet was provided for them, presided
over by the steward of the estate ; as the great Mr.
did not honor the plebeian company with his presence.
This is a feature of the structure of English society
which the best read American would not be likely
to recognise without travelling somewhat extensively
in the country. The British Nobility, the great,
world-renowned Middle Class, and the poor laboring

London to John O 1 Groat's. 265

population constitute the three great divisions of the
people and include them all in his mind. He is
apt to leave out of count the Grentry, the great un-
titled MISTERS, who come in between the nobility
and middle-men, and constitute the connecting link
between them. " The fine old English gentleman, all
of the olden time," is supposed to belong to this class.
They make up most of "the old county families," of
which you hear more than you read. They are gene-
rally large landholders, owning from twenty to one
hundred farms. They live in grand old mansions,
surrounded with liveried servants, and inspire a mild
awe and respectful admiration, not only in the common
country people, but in the minds of persons in whom
an American would not look for such homage to
untitled rank. They hunt with horses and dogs over
the grounds of their tenant farmers, and the latter often
act as game-beaters for them at their "shootings."
When one of them owns a whole village, church and
all, he is generally called " the Squire," but most
of them are squired without the definite article. They
still boast of as good specimens of " the fine old English
gentleman " as the country can show ; and I am in-
clined to think it is not an unfounded pretension, although
I have not yet come in contact with many of the class.
One of this country squirocracy I know personally

266 A Walk from

and well, and other Americans kuow him as well
as myself, who, though living in a palace of his
own, once occupied by an exiled French sovereign,
is just as simple and honest as a child in every feature
of his disposition and deportment. Every year he
has a Festival in his park, lasting two or three days.
It is a kind of out-door Parliament and a Greenwich
Fair combined, as it would seem at first sight to
an incidental spectator. I do not believe anything
in the rest of the wide world could equal this gather-
ing, for many peculiar features of enjoyment. It is
made up of both sexes and all ages and conditions ;
especially of the laboring classes. They come out
strong on these occasions. The round and red faced
boys and girls of villages and hamlets for a great
distance around look forward to this annual frolic with
exhilarating expectation. Never was romping and
racing and the amorous forfeit plays of the ring got
up under more favorable auspices, or with more
pleasant surroundings. It would do any man's heart
good, who was ever a genuine boy, to see the venerable
squire and his lady presiding over a race between
competing couples of ploughmen's boys, from ten to
fifteen years of age, running their rounds in the park,
barefooted, bare-headed, with faces as round and red
as a ripe pumpkin, and hair of the same color whipping

London to John O 1 Groat's. 267

the air as they neck-and-neck it in the middle of the
heat. When the winners of the prizes receive their
rewards at his hands, his kind words and the radiant
benevolence of his face they value more than the con-
quest and the coins they win.

Then there are intellectual entertainments and de-
liberative proceedings of grave moment arranged for
the elder portion of the great congregation. While
groups of blushing lads and lasses are hunting the
handkerchief in the hustle and tussle of the ring under
the great, solemn elms, a scene may be witnessed on the
lawn nearer the mansion that ought to have been
painted long ago. Two or three double-horse wagons
are ranged end to end in the shade, and planks are
placed along from one end to the other, making a
continuous seat for a score or two of orators. In front
of this dozen-wheeled tribune rows of seats, capable of
holding several hundred persons, are arranged within
hearing distance. When these are all filled and sur-
rounded by a standing wall of men and women, three
or four deep, and when the orators of the day ascend
over the wheels to the long wagon-seat, you have a
scene and an assembly the like of which you find no
where else in Christendom. No Saxon parliament of
the Heptarchy could " hold a candle to it." Never, in
any age or country of free speech, did individual ideas,

268 A Walk from

idiosyncracies, and liberty of conscience have freer scope
and play. Never did all the isms of philanthropy,
politics, or of social and moral reform generally have
such a harmonious trysting time of it. Never was
there a platform erected for discussing things local and
general so catholic as the one now resting upon the
wheels of those farm wagons. Every year the bland
and venerable host succeeds in widening the area of
debate. I was invited to be present at the Festival
this year, but was too far on the road to John 0' Groat's
to participate in a pleasure I have often enjoyed. But
I read his resume of the year's doings, aspects and
prospects from Japan to Hudson's Bay with lively
interest and valuable instruction. He seldom presides
himself as chairman, but leaves that post of honor to
be filled, if possible, by the citizen of some foreign
country, if he can speak English tolerably. This gives
a more cosmopolitan aspect to the assembly. But he
himself always makes what in Parliament would be
called " a financial statement," without the reference
to money matters. He sums up the significance of all
the great events of the year, bearing upon human
progress in general, and upon each specific enterprise
in particular. With palatial mansions, parks, and
farms great and small, scattered through several coun-
ties, he is the greatest radical in England. He dis-

London to John O 'Groat's. 269

tances the Chartists altogether in his programme, and
adds several new points to their political creed. He
not only advocates manhood suffrage, but womanhood
suffrage, and woman-seats in Parliament. Then he is
a great friend of a reform which the Chartists grieviously
overlook, and which would make thousands of them
voters if they would adopt it. That is, Total Absti-
nence from Tobacco, as well as from ardent spirits.
Thus, no report of modern times equals the good
Squire's summing up, which he gives on these occa-
sions, from the great farm-wagon tribune, to the mul-
titudinous and motley congregation assembled under
his park trees. This year it was unusually rich and
piquant, from the expanded area of events and aspects.
In presenting these, as bearing upon the causes of
Temperance, Peace, Anti-War, Anti-Slavery, Anti-
Tobacco, Anti-Capital Punishment, Anti-Church-Eates,
Free Trade, Woman's Eights, Parliamentary Eeform,
Social Eeform, Scientific Progress, Discovery of the
Sources of the Nile, and other important movements,
he was necessarily obliged to be somewhat discursive.
But he generalised with much ease and perspicuity,
and conducted the thread of his discourse, like a rivulet
of light, through the histories of the year ; transporting
the mind of his audience from doings in Japan to those
in America, from Poland to Mexico, and through stir-

270 A Walk from

ring regions of Geography, Politics, Philanthropy,
Social Science and Economy, by gentle and interest-
ing transitions. This annual statement is very valuable
and instructive, and should have a wider publicity than
it usually obtains.

When "the fine old English gentleman all of the
olden time " has concluded his resume of the year's pro-
gress, and the prospects it leaves to the one incoming,
the orators of the different causes which he has thus
reported, arise one after the other, and the bright air
and the green foliage of the over-spreading trees, as well
as the listening multitude below, are stirred with
fervid speeches, sometimes interspersed with "music
from the band." The Festival is wound up by a
banquet in the hall, given by the munificent host to
a large number of guests, representing the various
good movements advocated from the platform described.
Many Americans have spoken from that rostrum,
and sat at that banquet table in years gone by, and
they will attest to the correctness of these slight
delineations of the character of the host and of the
annual festival that will perpetuate his name in long
and pleasant remembrance.

Oakham is a goodly and pleasant town, the chief
and capital of Rutlandshire. It has the ruins of an
old castle in its midst, and several interesting aiiti-

London to John O 1 Groat's. 271

quities and customs. It, too, has its unique speciality
or prerogative. I was told that every person of title
driving through the town, or coming to reside within
the jurisdiction of its bye-laws, must leave his card
to the authorities in the shape of a veritable horse-shoe.
It is said that the walls of the old town hall are hung
with these iron souvenirs of distinguished visits ; thus
constituting a museum that would be instructive to
a farrier or blacksmith, as well as to the antiquarian.

From Oakham I walked to Melton Mowbray, a
cleanly, good-looking town in Leicestershire, situated
on the little river Eye. One cannot say exactly in
regard to Rutlandshire what an Englishman once said
to the authorities of a pigmy Italian duchy, who
ordered him to leave it in twenty-four hours. " I only
require fifteen minutes," said cousin John, with a look
and tone which Jonathan could not imitate. This
rural county is to the shire-family of England what
Rhode Island is to the American family of States the
smallest, but not least, in several happy characteristics.

I spent a quiet sabbath in Melton Mowbray ;
attended divine service in the old parish church and
listened- to two extemporaneous sermons full of simple
and earnest teaching, and delivered in a conversational
tone of voice. Here, too, the parish church was seated
in the midst of the great congregation which had long

272 A Walk from

ceased to listen to the call of its sabbath bells. It was
a beautiful and touching arrangement of the olden
time to erect the House of Prayer in the centre of
" Grod's Acre," that the shadow of its belfry and the
sabbath voice of its silvery bells might float for
centuries over the family circles lying side by side in
their long homes around the sanctuary. There was a
good and tender thought in making up this sabbath
society of the living and the dead ; in planting the
narrow pathway between the two Sions with the white
milestones of generations that had travelled in it ages
gone, leaving here and there words of faith, hope and
admonition to those following in their footsteps. It
is one of the contingencies of " higher civilization "
that this social economy of the churchyard, that linked
present and past generations in such touching and
instructive companionship, has been suspended and
annulled.

Melton Mowbray has also a very respectable indivi-
duality. It is a great centre for the scarlet-coated
Nimrods who scale hedges and ditches, in well-mounted
squadrons, after a fox preserved at great' expense and
care to become the victim of their valor. But this
is a small and frivolous distinction compared with
its celebrated manufacture of jjork-pics. It bids fair
to become as famous for them as Banbury is for buns.

London to John C? Groat's. 273

I visited the principal establishment for providing the
travelling and pic-nicking world with these very sub-
stantial and palatable portables. I went under the
impulse of that uneasy, suspicious curiosity to peer
into the forbidden mysteries of the kitchen which
generally brings no satisfaction when gratified, and
which often admonishes a man not only to eat what
is set before him without any questions for conscience
sake, but also for the sake of the more delicate and
exacting sensibilities of the stomach. I must confess
my first visit to this, the greatest, pork-pie factory in
the world savored a little of the anxiety to know the
worst, instead of the best, in regard to the solid
materials and lighter ingredients which entered into
the composition of these suspiciously cheap Iuxuri.es.
There were points also connected with the process of
their elaboration which had given me an undefinable
uneasiness in the refreshment rooms of a hundred
railway stations. I was determined to settle these
moot points once for all. So I entered the establish-
ment with an eye of as keen a speculation as an excise-
man's searching a building for illicit distillery, and I
came out of it a more charitable and contented man.
All was above-board, fair and clean. The meat was
fresh and good. The flour was fine and sweet; the
butter and lard would grace the neatest housewife's

274 A Walk from

larder ; the forms on which the pies were moulded
were as pure as spotless marble. The men and boys
looked healthy and bright ; their hands were smooth
and clean, and their aprons white as snow. Not one
of them smoked or took snuff at his work. I saw
every process and implement employed in the con-
struction of these pies for the market ; the great tubs of
pepper and spice, the huge ovens, the cooling racks,
the packing room ; in a word, every department and
feature of the establishment. And the best thing I
can say of it is this : that I shall eat with better satis-
faction and relish hereafter the pies bearing the brand
of Evans, of Melton Mowbray, than I ever did before.
The famous Stilton cheese is another speciality of this
quiet and interesting town, or of its immediate neigh-
borhood. So, putting the two articles of luxury and
consumption together, it is rather ahead of Banbury
with its cakes.

On Monday, August llth, I resumed my walk
northward, and passed through a very highly culti-
vated and interesting section. About the middle of
the afternoon, I reached Broughton Hill, and looked
off upon the most beautiful and magnificent landscape
I have yet seen in England. It was the Belvoir
Yale ; and it would be worth a hundred miles'
walk to see it, if that was the only way to reach it.

London to John O 1 Groat's. 275

It lay in a half-moon shape, the base line measuring
apparently about twenty miles in length. As I sat
upon the high wall of this valley, that overlooks it
on the south, I felt that I was looking upon the most
highly-finished piece of pre-Eaphaelite artistry that
could be found in the world, the artistry of the
plough, glorious and beautiful with the unconscious
and involuntary pictures which patient human labor
paints upon the canvas of Nature. Never did I see
the like before. If Turner had the shaping of the
ground entirely for an artistic purpose, it could not
have been more happily formed for a display of agricul-
tural pictures. What might be called the physical
vista made the most perfect hemiorama I ever looked
upon. The long, high, wooded ridge, including
Broughton Hill, eclipsed, as it were, just half the
disk of a circle twenty miles in diameter, leaving the
other half in all the glow and glory that Nature
and that great blind painter, Agricultural Industry,
could give to it. The valley with its foot against this
mountainous ridge, put out its right arm and enfolded
to its bosom a little, beautiful world of its own of about
fifty miles girth. In this embrace were included hun-
dreds of softly-rounded hills, with their intervening
valleys, villages, hamlets, church spires and towers,
plantations, groves, copses and hedgerow trees, grouped
T -2

276 A Walk from

by sheer accident as picturesquely as Turner himself
could have arranged them. The elevation of the ridge
on which I sat softened down all these distant hills,
so that they looked only like little undulating risings
by which the valley gently ascended to the blue rim
of the horizon on the north.

It was an excellent standpoint on which to balance
Nature and Human Industry ; to estimate their separate
and joint work upon that vast landscape. A few cen-
turies ago, perhaps about the time that the Mayflower
sighted Plymouth Rock, this valley, now so inde-
scribably beautiful, was almost in the state of nature.
Wolves and wild boars may have been prowling about
in the woods and tangled thickets that covered this
ridge back for several leagues. Bushes, bogs and
briers, and coarse prairie grass roughened the bottom
of this valley ; matted heather, furze, broom and
clumps of shrubby trees, all those hills and uplands
arising in the background to the northward horizon.
This declining sun, and the moon and stars that will
soon follow in the pathway of its chariot, like a liveried
cortege, shone upon that scene with all the light they
will give this day and night. The rain and dew,
and all the genial ministries of the seasons, did their
unaided best to make it lovely and beautiful. The
sweetest singing-birds of England came and tried

London to John O 1 Groats. 277

to cheer its solitude with their happy voices. The
summer breezes came with their softest breath, whis-
pering through brake, bush and brier the little
speeches of Nature's life. The summer bees came and
filled all those heather-purpled acres with their in-
dustrial lays, and sang a merry song in the door of
every wild-flower that gave them the petalled honey
of its heart. All the trained and travelling industrials
and all the sweet influences of Nature came and did
all they could without man's help to make this great
valley most delightful to the eye. But the wolves
still prowled and howled ; the briers grew rough and
rank ; the grass, coarse and thin ; the heathered hills
were oozy and cold in their watery beds ; the clumpy,
shrubby trees wore the same ragged coats of moss;
and no feature of the scene mended for the better
from year to year.

Then came the great Blind Painter, with his rude,
iron pencils, to the help of Nature. He came with the
Axe, Plough and Spade, her mightiest allies. "With
these he had driven wild Druidic Paganism back mile
by mile from England's centre ; back into her dark
fastnesses. With the Axe, Spade and Plough he chased
the foul beasts and barbarisms from the island. Two
centuries long was he in painting this Beautiful Valley.
Nature ground and mixed the colors for him all the

278 A Walk from

while, for he was blind. He was poor ; often cold and
hungry, and his children, with blue fingers and pale,
silent eyes, sometimes asked for bread in winter he
could not give. He lived in a low cottage, small,
damp and dark, and laid him down at night upon a
bed of straw. He could not read; and his thoughts
of human life and its hereafter were few and small.
He had no taste for music, and seldom whistled at his
work. He wore a coarse garment, of ghostly pattern,
called a smock-frock. His hat just rounded his head
to a more globular and mindless form. His shoes were
as heavy as a horse's with iron nails. He had no eye
nor taste for colors. If all the trees, if all the crops of
grain, grass and roots on which he wrought his life
long, had come out in brickdust and oil, it would have
been all the same to him, if they had sold as high in
the market, and beer and bread had been as cheap for
the uniformity. And yet he was the Turner of this
great painting. He is the artist that has made Eng-
land a gallery of the finest agricultural pictures in the
world. And in no country in Christendom is High
Art so appreciated to such pecuniary patronage and
valuation as here. In none is the genius of the Pencil
so treasured, so paid, and almost worshipped as here.
The public and private galleries of Britain hold pic-
tures that would buy every acre of the island at the

London to John O 1 Groat's. 279

price current of it when Elizabeth was queen. One of
Turner's landscapes would pay for a whole Highland
county at its valuation when Mary held her first court
in Holyrood.

I sit here and look off upon this largest, loveliest
picture the Blind Painter has given to England. I
note his grouping of the ivy-framed fields, of every
size and form, panelling the gently-rounded hills, and
all the soft slopes down to the foot of the valley ; the
silvery, ripe barley against the dark-green beans ; the
rich gold of the wheat against the smooth, blue-dashed
leaves of the mangel wurzel or ruta baga ; the ripening
oats overlooking a foreground of vividly green turnips,
with alternations of pasture and meadow land, hedges
running in every direction, plantations, groves, copses
sprinkled over the whole vista, as if the whole little
world, clear up to the soft, blue fringe of the horizon,
were the design and work of a single artist. And this,
and ten thousand pictures of the same genius, was the
work of the Briarean-handed BLIND PAINTER, who
still wears a smock-frock and hobnailed shoes, and
lives in a low, damp cottage, and dines on bread and
cheese among the golden sheaves of harvest !

0, Mother England ! thou that knightest the artists
while living, and buildest their sepulchres when dead ;
thou that honorest to such stature of praise the

280 A Walk from

plagiarists upon Nature, and clothest the copyists of
patient Labor's pictures in such purple and fine linen ;
thou whose heart is softening to the sweet "benevolences
of Christian charity in so many directions, wilt thou
not think, with a new sentiment of kindness and sym-
pathy, on this Blind Painter, who has tapestried the
hills and valleys of thy island with an artistry that
angels might look upon with admiration and wonder !

Wilt thou not build him a better cottage to live in ?

Wilt thou not give him something better than dry
bread and cold bacon for dinner in harvest ?

Wilt thou not teach all his children to read the
alphabet and the blessed syllables of the Great Reve-
lation of Grod's Love to man ?

Wilt thou not make a morning-ward door in his
dwelling and show him a future with a sun in it, in
this world, as well as in the world to come ?

Wilt thou not open up a pathway through the valley
of his humiliation by which his children may ascend to
the better conditions of society ?

London to John O Groat's. 281

CHAPTEE XIY.

NOTTINGHAM AND ITS CHARACTERISTICS NEWSTEAD ABBEY MANSFIELD

TALK IN A BLACKSMITH'S SHOP CHESTERFIELD, CHATSWORTH
AND HADDON HALL ARISTOCRATIC CIVILIZATION, PRESENT AND

PAST.

"1T1EOM the Belvoir Vale I continued my walk to
_L Nottingham the following day ; crossing a grand
old bridge over the Trent. Take it all in all, this may
be called perhaps the most English town in England ;
stirring, plucky and radical ; full of industrial intel-
lect and vigor. Its chief businesses involve and exer-
cise thought; and thought educed into one direction
and activity, runs naturally into others. The whole
population, under these influences, has become peopled
to a remarkable status and strength of opinion, senti-
ment and action. They prefix that large and generous
quality to their best doings and institutions, and have
their Peoples' College, Peoples' Park, &c. The Peoples'
Charter had its stronghold here, and all radical reforms
are sure to find sympathy and support among the
People of Nottingham. I should think no equal popu-
lation in the kingdom would sing " Britons never,

282 A Walk from

never will be slaves," with more spirit, or, perhaps,
with more understanding. Their plucky, English
natures became terribly stirred up in the exciting
time of the Reform Bill, and they burned down the
magnificent palace-castle of the old Duke of Newcastle,
crowning the mountainous rock which terminates on
the west the elevated ridge on which the town is built.
When the Bill was carried, and the People had cooled
down to their normal condition of mind, they were
obliged to pay for this evening's illumination of their
wrath pretty dearly. The Duke mulcted the town and
county to the tune of 21,000, or full $100,000. The
castle was no Chepstow structure, rough and rude for
war, but more like the ornate and castellated palace
at Heidelberg, and .it was almost as high above the
Trent as the latter is above the Neckar. The view the
site commands is truly magnificent, embracing the
Trent Valley, and an extensive vista beyond it. It
was really the great lion of the town, and the People,
having paid the 21,000 for dismounting it, because
it roared in the wrong direction on the Reform Bill,
expected, of course, that His Grace the Duke would set
it up again on the old pedestal, with its mane and tail
and general aspect much improved. But they counted
without their host. " Is ifl not lawful to do what I
will with my own," was the substance of his reply ;

London to John O* Groat's. 283

and there stands the blackened, crumbling ruin to this
day, as a silent but grim reproach to the People for
letting their angry passions rise to such destructive
excitement on political questions.

Hosiery and lace are the two great manufacturing
interests of Nottingham, and the tons of these articles
it turns out yearly for the world are astonishing in
number and value. A single London house employs
3,000 hands in the town and immediate vicinity upon
hosiery alone for its establishment. Lace now seems
to lead the way, and there are whole streets of factories
and warehouses busy with its manufacture and sale.
Perhaps no fabric in the world ever tested the inge-
nuity and value of machinery like this. The cost
has been reduced, from the old handworking to the
present process, from three dollars to three cents a
yard ! I think no machinery yet invented has been
endowed with more delicate functions of human reason
and genius than that employed upon the flower-work
of this subtle drapery. Until I saw it with my own
eyes, I had concluded that the machinery invented
or employed in America for setting card-teeth was
the most astute, and as nearly approaching the faculties
of the human mind in its apparent thought-power,
as it was reverent and safe to carry anything made
of iron and steel, or made by man at all. To con-

284 A Walk from

struct a machine which should pass between its fingers
a broad belt of leather and a fine thread of wire, prick
rows of holes across the breadth of the leather, bend,
cut off, and insert the shank ends of the teeth clear
through these holes, and clinch them on the back side,
and pour out a continuous, uninterrupted stream of
perfectly-teethed belt, all ready for carding, this, I
fancied, was the ne plus ultra of mechanical inventions.
But it is quite surpassed by the lace-weaving looms
of Nottingham, that work out, to exquisite perfection,
all the flowers, leaves, vine and vein-work of nature.
It was wonderful to see the ductility of cotton, as
here exemplified. The bobbins, which, I suppose, are
a mere refinement upon the old hand-thrown shuttle,
are of brass, about the size of half-a-crown. A groove
that will just admit the thin edge of a case-knife,
is cut into the rim of the little wheel, about one quarter
of an inch deep. A cotton thread 120 yards in length,
and strong enough to be twitched about and twisted
by a score of vigorous, chattering, iron fingers, is wound
around in this groove. But it would be idle to attempt
a description of either the machinery or the process.

I went next into a large establishment for dyeing,
dressing, winding and packing the lace for market.
It was startling to see the acres of it dyed black for
mourning. Really there seemed enough of it to drape

London to John O' Groat's. 285

the whole valley of the shadow of death ! It was an
impressive sight truly. If there were other establish-
ments doing the same thing, Nottingham must turn
out weeds of grief enough for several millions of
mourning widows, mothers, sisters and daughters in a
year. I ascended into the dressing-room, I think they
called it, in the upper story, where there was a peice
containing one twenty-fifth of an acre of lace under-
going a fearful operation for a human constitution to
sustain. It was necessary that the heat of the apart-
ment should be kept at one hundred and twenty degrees !
There was a large number of women and girls, and a
few men and boys working under this melting ordeal.
And one of the proprietors was at their head, in a
rather summer dress, and with a seethed and crimson
face beaded with hot perspiration. It was a very
delicate and important operation which he had not
only to watch with his own eyes, but to work at with
his own hands. I was glad to learn that he was a
staunch Protestant, and did not believe in purgatory ;
but those poor girls ! could they be expected to hold
to the same belief under such a test ?

I was told that they get up lace so cheap that the
people of the town frequently cover their gooseberry
bushes with it to keep off the insects. Spider-webbing
is a scarcely more gossamer-like fabric. Sixteen square

286 A Walk from

yards of this lace only weigh about an ounce ! If
the negroes on one of the South Carolina Sea-island
plantations could have been shut into that dressing-
room for two whole minutes, with the mercury at 120
degrees, they would have rolled up the whites of their
eyes in perfect amazement and made a rush for
" Dixie" again.

From Nottingham I made an afternoon walk to
Mansfield. The weather was splendid and the country
in all the glory of harvest. On reaching Newstead
Abbey, I found, to my regret, that the entree to the
public had been closed by the new proprietor, one, I
was told, of the manufacturing gentry of the Man-
chester school. Not that he was less liberal and
accommodating to sight-seers than his predecessors,
but because he was making very extensive and costly
improvements in the buildings and grounds. I have
seen nothing yet in England to compare, for ornate
carving, with the new gateway he is making to the
park. It is of the finest kind of arabesque work done
in stone that much resembles the Caen. This pre-
vention barred me from even a distant view of the once
famous residence of Lord Byron, as it could not be
seen from the public road.

Within about three miles of Mansfield, I came to
a turnpike gate a neat, cosy, comfortable cottage,

London to John O 1 Groat's. 287

got up in the Gothic order. I stopped to rest a
moment, and noticing the good woman setting her
tea-table, I invited myself to a seat at it, on the inn
basis, and had a pleasant meal and chat with her
and an under-gamekeeper of the Duke of Portland,
who had come in a little before me. The stories he
told me about the extent of the Duke's possessions
were marvellous, more especially in reference to his
game preserves. I should think there must be a
larger number of hares, rabbits, and partridges on
his estate than in the whole of New England. As
I sat engaged in conversation with the woman of the
house and this accidental guest, an unmistakable
American face met my eyes, as I raised them to the
opposite wall. It was the familiar face of a Bristol
clock, made in the Connecticut village adjoining the
one in which I was born. It wore the same honest
expression, which a great many ill-natured people,
especially in our Southern States, have regarded as
covering a dishonest and untruthful mind, or a bad
memory of the hours. Still it is the most ubiquitous
Americanism in the world, and it is pleasant to see
its face in so many cottages of laboring men from
Land's End to John 0' Groat's.

Mansfield is a very substantial and venerable town,
bearing a name which one distinguished man has rendered

288 A Walk from

illustrious by wearing it through a brilliant life. It is
situated near the celebrated Sherwood Forest, and is
marked by many features of peculiar interest. One of
its noticeable celebrities is the house in which Lord
Chesterfield resided. It is now occupied by a Wes-
leyan minister, who elaborates his sermons in the
very room, I believe, in which that fashionable noble-
man penned his polite literature for youthful candidates
for the uppermost circles of society. In the centre
of the market place there is a magnificent monument
erected to the memory of the late Lord George
Bentinck, who was held in high esteem by the people
of the town and vicinity. The manufactures are pretty
much the same as in Nottingham. They turn out
a great production of raw material in red sandstone,
very much resembling our Portland, quite as fine,
hard and durable. Immense blocks of it are quarried
and conveyed to London and to all parts of the king-
dom. The town also supplies a vast amount of
moulding sand, of nearly the same color and con-
sistency as that we procure from Albany. I stopped
on my way into the town to take a turn through
the cemetery, which was very beautifully laid out,
and looked like a great garden lawn belted with
shrubbery, and illuminated with the variegated lamps
of flowers of every hue and breath. The meandering

London to John O 1 Groat's. 289

walks were all laid with asphalte, which presented a
new and striking contrast to the gorgeous borders and
the vivid green of the cleanly shaven grass. Many of
the little graves were made in nests of geraniums and
other modest and sweet-eyed stars of hope.

Next day I had a very enjoyable walk in a north-
westerly direction to Chesterfield. On the way, called
in at a blacksmith's shop, and had a long talk with the
smith-in-chief on matters connected with his trade.
The " custom work " of such shops in country villages
in England is like that in ours fifty years ago
embracing the greatest variety of jobs. Articles now
made with us in large manufacturing establishments
at a price which would starve a master and his
apprentice to compete with, are hammered out in these
English shops on a single anvil. On comparing notes
with this knight of the hammer, I learned a fact I had
not known before. His price for horse-shoeing varied
according to the size of the hoof, just as our leather-
shoemakers charge according to the foot. On taking
leave of him he intimated, in the most frank and
natural way in the world, that, in our exchange of
information, the balance was in his favor, and that
I could not but think it fair to pay him the diffe-
rence. I looked at him first inquiringly and doubtingly,
embarrassed with the idea that I had not understood

290 A Walk from

him, or that he was a journeyman and not the master
of the establishment. But he was as free and easy
and natural as possible. An American tobacco-chewer,
of fifty years' standing, would not have asked a cut
from a neighbor's "lady's twist," or "pig-tail" in
more perfect good faith. That good, round, English
face would have blushed crimson if the man suspected
that I misunderstood him. Nay, more, he would quite
likely have thrown the pennies at my head if I had
offered them to him to buy bread or bacon with for
himself and family. I had no reason for a moment's
doubt. It all meant beer, " only that and nothing
more;" a mere pour boire souvenir to celebrate our
mutual acquaintance. So I gave him a couple of
pennies, just as I would have given him a bite of
tobacco if we had both been in that line. I feared to
give him more, lest he might think I meant bread and
bacon and thought him a beggar. But I ventured to
tell him, however, that I did not use that beverage
myself, and hoped he would wish me health in some
better enjoyment.

I saw, for the first time, a number of Spanish cattle
feeding in a pasture. They were large, variously
colored animals with the widely-branching horns that
distinguish them. A man must have a long range of
buildings to stable a score of creatures with such horns,

London to John Cf Groat's. 291

and for that reason they will only be kept as curiosities
in these northern latitudes. And they are curiosities
of animal life, heightened to a wonderment when
placed side by side with the black Galloways, or those
British breeds of cattle which have no horns at all. I
should not wonder, however, if this large, cream-colored
stock from Spain should be introduced here to cross
with the Durhams, Devons, and Herefords.

When about half-way from Mansfield to Chester-
field, a remarkable change came over the face of the
landscape. The mosaic work of the hill-sides and
valleys showed more green squares than before. Three-
fourths of the fields were meadow or pasture, or in
mangel or turnips. There was but one here and there
in wheat or other grain. The road beneath and the
sky above began to blacken, and the chimneys of
coal pits to thicken. Sooty-faced men, horses and
donkeys passed with loaded carts; and all the pre-
monitory aspects of the "black country" multiplied
as I proceeded. I do not recollect ever seeing a land-
scape change so suddenly in England.

Chesterfield is an intelligent looking town, evidently
growing in population and prosperity. It has its own
unique speciality; almost as strikingly distinctive as
that of Strasburg or Pisa. This is the most ambiguous
and mysterious church spire in the world. It would
u '2

292 A Walk from

be very difficult to convey any idea of it by any
description of an unaided pen ; and there is nothing-
extant that would avail as an illustration. The church
is very old and large, and stands upon a commanding
eminence. The massive tower supports a tall but
suddenly tapering spire of the most puzzling con-
struction to the eye. It must have been designed
by a monk of the olden time, with a Chinese turn of
ingenuity. There is no order known to architecture to
furnish a term or likeness for it. A ridgy, spiral spire
are the three most descriptive words, but these are not
half enough for stating the shape, style and posture
of this strange steeple. It is difficult even to assist
the imagination to form an idea of it. I will essay
a few words in that direction. Suppose, then, a plain
spire, 100 feet high, in the form of an attenuated cone,
planted upon a heavy church tower. Now, in imagina-
tion, plough this cone all around into deep ridges
from top to bottom. Then mount to the top, and,
with a great iron wrench, give it an even twist clear
down to the base, so that each ridge shall wind entirely
around the spire between the bottom and the top.
Then, in giving it this screw-looking twist, bend over
the top, with a gentle incline all the way down, so
that it shall be " out of perpendicular " by about three
feet. Then come down and look at your work, and

London to John O Groat's. 293

you will be astonished at it, standing far or near.
The tall, ridgy, curved, conical screw puzzles you
with all sorts of optical illusions. As the eyes in a
front-face portrait follow you around the room in
which it is hung, so this strange spire seems to lean
over upon you at every point, as you walk round the
church. Indeed, I believe it was only found out
several centuries after its erection, that it absolutely
leaned more in one direction than another. It is a
remarkable sight from the railway as you approach
the town from a distance. If it may be said reve-
rently, the church, standing on comparatively a hill,
not only lifts its horn on high, but one like that of a
rhinoceros, considerably curved. Just outside the town
stands the house in which Greorge Stephenson lived his
last days, and ended his great life of benefaction to man-
kind ; leaving upon that haloed spot a biograph which
the ages of time to come shall not wash out.

From Chesterfield I diverged westward to see Chats-
worth and Haddon Hall. Whoever makes this walk
or ride, let him be sure to stop on Watch Hill on the
way, and look at the view eastward. It is grander
than that of the Belvoir Vale, if not so beautiful.

It was a pleasure quite equal to my anticipation to
visit Chatsworth for the first time, after a sojourn in
England, off and on, for sixteen years. It is the lion

294 -^ Walk from

number three, according to the American ranking of
the historical edifices and localities of England. Strat-
ford-upon-Avon, Westminster Abbey and Chatsworth
are the three representative celebrities which our tra-
vellers think they must visit, if they would see the life
of England's ages from the best stand-points. And
this is the order in which they rank them. Chatsworth
and Haddon Hall should be seen the same day if pos-
sible ; so that you may carry the impressions of the one
fresh and active into the other. They are the two
most representative buildings in the kingdom. Haddon
is old English feudalism edificed. It represents the
rough grandeur, hospitality, wassail and rude romance
of the English nobility five hundred years ago. It was
all in its glory about the time when Thomas-a-Becket
the Magnificent used to entertain great companies of
belted knights of the realm in a manner that exceeded
regal munificence in those days, even directing fresh
straw to be laid for them on his ample mansion floor,
that they might not soil the bravery of their dresses
when they bunked down for the night. The building
is brimful of the character and history of that period.
Indeed, there are no two milestones of English history
so near together, and yet measuring such a space of
the nation's life and manners between them, as this
hall and that of Chatsworth. It was built, of course,

London to John O Groat's. 295

in the bow-and-arrow times, when the sun had to use
the same missiles in shooting its barbed rays into the
narrow apertures of old castles- or the stone coffins of
fear-hunted knights and ladies, as they might be called.
What a monument this to the dispositions and habits
of the world, outside and inside, of that early time !
Here is the porter's or warder's lodge just inside the
huge gate. To think of a living being with a human
soul in him burrowing in such a place ! a big, black
sarcophagus without a lid to it, set deep in the solid
wall. Then there is the chapel. Compare it with that
of Chatsworth, and you may count almost on your
fingers the centuries that have intervened between
them. It was new-roofed soon after the discovery of
America, and perhaps done up to some show of decency
and comfort. But how small and rude the pulpit and
pews looking like rough-boarded potato-bins ! Here
is the great banquet-hall, full to overflowing with the
tracks and cross-tracks of that wild, strange life of old.
There is a fire-place for you, and the mark in the
chimney-back of five hundred Christmas logs. Doubt-
less this great stone pavement of a floor was carpeted
with straw at these banquets, after the illustrious
Becket's pattern. Here is a memento of the feast
hanging up at the top of the kitchen ward door; a
pair of roughly-forged, rusty handcuffs amalgamated

296 A Walk front

into one pair of jaws, like a musk-rat trap. What was
the use of that thing, conductor ? " That, sir, they
put the 'ands in of them as shirked and didn't drink
up all the wine as was poured into their cups, and
there they made them stand on tiptoe up against that
door, sir, before all the company, sir, until they was
ashamed of theirselves." Descend into the kitchen, all
scarred with the tremendous cookery of ages. Here
they roasted bullocks whole, and just back in that dark
vault with a slit or two in it for the light, they killed
and dressed them. There are the relics of the shambles.
And here is the great form on which they cut them up
into manageable pieces. It would do you good, you
Young America, to see that form, and the cross-gashes of
the meat-axe in it. It is the half of a gigantic English
oak, which was growing in Julius Caesar's time, sawed
through lengthwise, making a top surface several feet
wide, black and smooth as ebony. Some of the bark
still clings to the under side. The dancing hall is
the great room of the building. All that the taste,
art and wealth of that day could do, was done to make
it a splendid apartment, and it would pass muster still
as a comfortable and respectable salon. As we pass out,
you may decipher the short prayer cut in the wasting
stone over a side portal, " GOD SAVE THE YERNONS ! "
I hope this prayer has been favorably answered ; for

London to yohn O 1 Groat's. 297

history records much virtue in the family, mingled with
some romantic escapades, which have contributed, I be-
lieve, to the entertainment of many novel readers.

Just what Haddon Hall is to the baronial life and
society of England five hundred years ago, is Chats-
worth to the fall stature of modern civilization and
aristocratic wealth, taste and position. Of this it is
probably the best measure and representative in the
kingdom ; and as such it possesses a special value and
interest to the world at large. Were it not for here
and there such an establishment, we should lack way-
marks in the progress of the arts, sciences and tastes
of advancing civilization. Grovernments and joint-
stock companies may erect and fill, with a world of
utilities and curiosities of ancient and modern times,
British Museums, National Galleries, Crystal Palaces
and Polytechnic Institutions; but not one of these,
nor the Louvre, nor Versailles, nor the Tuileries can
compete with one private mind, taste and will con-
centrated upon one great work for a life time, when
endowed with the requisite perceptions and means
competent to carry that work to the highest perfection
of science, genius and art. Museums, galleries and
public institutions of art are exclusively visiting places.
The elegancies of home life are all shut out of their
attractions. You see in them the work and presence

298 A Walk from

of a committee, or corporation, often in discrepant
layers of taste and plan. One mind does not stand out
or above the whole, fashioning the tout-ensemble to the
symmetrical lines of one governing, all-pervading and
shaping thought. You see no exquisite artistry of
drawing-room or boudoir elegance and luxury running
through living apartments of home, out into the con-
servatories, lawns, gardens, park and all its surround-
ings and embellishments, making the whole like a
great illuminated volume of family life, which you may
peruse page by page, and trace the same pen and the
same story from beginning to end. Even the grandest
royal residences lack, in this quality, what you will
find at Chatsworth. They all show the sharp-edged
strata of unamliated tastes and styles of different ages
and artists. They lack the oneness of a single indi-
viduality, of one great symmetrical conception.

This one-mindedness, this one-man power of con-
ception and execution gives to the Duke of Devon-
shire's palace at Chatsworth an interest and a value that
probably do not attach to any other private establishment
in England. In this felicitous characteristic it stands
out in remarkable prominence and in striking contrast
with nearly all the other baronial halls of the country.
It is the parlor pier-glass of the present century. It
reflects the two images in vivid apposition the brilliant

London to John OGroat's. 299

civilization of this last, unfinished age in which we live
and the life of bygone centuries ; that is, if Haddon
Hall shows its face in it, or if you have the features of
that antiquity before your eyes when you look into the
Chatsworth mirror. The whole of this magnificent
establishment bears the impress of the nineteenth
century, inside and outside. The architecture, sculp-
ture, carving, paintings, engravings, furniture, libraries,
conservatories, flowers, shrubberies and rockeries all
bear and honor the finger-prints of modern taste and
art. In no casket in England, probably, have so many
jewels of this century's civilization been treasured for
posterity as in this mansion on the little meandering
Derwent. If England has no grand National Grallery
like the French Louvre, she has works of art that
would fill fifty Louvres, collected and treasured in these
quiet private halls, embosomed in green parks and
plantations, from one end of the land to the other.
And in no other country are the private treasure-houses
of genius so accessible to the public as in this. They
doubtless act as educational centres for refining the
habits of the nation ; exerting an influence that reaches
and elevates the homes of the people, cultivating in
them new perceptions of beauty and comfort ; diffusing
a taste for embowering even humble cottages in
shrubbery ; making little flower-fringed lawns, six feet

300 A Walk from

by eight or less ; rockeries and ferneries, and artificial
ruins of castles or abbeys of smaller dimensions still.

In passing through the galleries and gardens of
Chatsworth you will recognise the originals of many
works of art which command the admiration of the
world. The most familiar to the American visitor will
probably be the great painting of the Bolton Abbey
Scene, the engravings of which are so numerous and
admired on both sides of the Atlantic. But there is
the original of a greater work, which has made the
wonder of the age. It is the original of the Great
Crystal Palace of 1851, and the mother of all the
palaces of the same structure which have been or will
be erected in time past or to come. Here it diadems
at Chatsworth the choice plants and flowers of all the
tropics ; presenting a model which needed only expan-
sion, and some modifications, to furnish the reproduction
that delighted the world in Hyde Park, in 1851.

I was pleasantly impressed with one feature of the
economy that ruled at Chatsworth. Although there
were between one and two thousand deer flecking the
park, it was utilised to the pasturage of humbler and
more useful animals. Over one hundred poor people's
cows were feeding demurely over its vast extent, even
to the gilded gates of the palace. They are charged
only 2 for the season ; which is very moderate, even

London to John O* Groat's. 301

cheaper than the stony pasturage around the villages
of New England. I noticed a flock of Spanish sheep,
black-and-white, looking like a drove of Berkshire hogs,
and seemingly clothed with bristles instead of wool.
They are kept rather as curiosities than for use.

Chatsworth, with all its treasures and embodiments
of wealth, art and genius, with an estate continuous in
one direction for about thirty miles, is but one of the
establishments of the Duke of Devonshire. He owns
a palace on the Thames that might crown the ambition
of a German prince. He also counts in his possessions
old abbeys, baro'nial halls, parks and towns that once
were walled, and still have streets called after their
gates. If any country is to have a personage occupy-
ing such a position, it is well to have a considerable
number of the same class, to yeomenise such an aristo-
cracy to make each feel that he has his peers in fifty
others. Otherwise an isolated duke would have to
live and move outside the pale of human society ; a
proud, haughty entity dashing about, with not even a
comet's orbit nor any fixed place in the constellation of
a nation's communities. It is of great necessity to
him, independent of political considerations, that there
is a House of Peers instituted, in which he may find
his social level ; where he may meet his equals in con-
siderable numbers, and feel himself but a man.

302 A Walk from

CHAPTER XV.

SHEFFIELD AND ITS INDIVIDUALITY - THE COUNTRY, ABOVE GROUND
AND UNDERGROUND - WAKEF1ELD AND LEEDS WHARF VALE -
FARNLEY HALL - HAREOWGATE J RIPLEY CASTLE ; RIPON J CONSER-
VATISM OF COUNTRY TOWNS - FOUNTAIN ABBEY ; STUDLEY PARK -
HIEVAULX ABBEY - LORD FAVERSHAM'S 8HOBT-HORN STOCK.

ROM Chatsworth I went on to Sheffield, crossing
_L a hilly moorland belonging to the Duke of
Rutland, and containing 10,000 acres in one solid
block. It was all covered with heather, and kept in
this wild, bleak condition for game. Here and there
well-cultivated farms, as it were, bit into this cold
waste, rescuing large, square morsels of land, and
making them glow with the warm flush and glory
of luxuriant harvests ; thus showing how such great
reaches of desert may be made to blossom like the
rose under the hand of human labor.

Here is Sheffield, down here, sweltering, smoking,
and sweating, with face like the tan, under the walls
of these surrounding hills. Here live and labor
Briareus and Cyclops of modern mythology. Here
they,

London to John O 1 Groat's. 303

Swing their heavy sledge,

With measured beats and slow ;
Like the sexton ringing the village bell,

When the evening sun is low.

Here live the lineal descendants of Thor, christianised
to human industries. Here the great hammer of the
Scandinavian Thunderer descended, took nest, and
hatched a brood of ten thousand little iron beetles
for beating iron and steel into shapes and uses that
Tubal Cain never dreamed of. Here you may hear
their clatter night and day upon a thousand anvils.
0, Yale of Vulcan ! 0, Valley of Knives ! Was ever
a boy put into trousers, in either hemisphere, that
did not carry in the first pocket made for him one
of thy cheap blades ? Did ever a reaper in the Old
World or New cut and bind a sheaf of grain, who
did not wield one of thy famous sickles ? All
Americans who were boys forty years ago, will re-
member three English centres of peculiar interest to
them. These were Sheffield, Colebrook Dale, and
Paternoster Row. There was hardly a house or log
cabin between the Penobscot and the Mississippi
which could not show the imprint of these three
places, on the iron tea-kettle, the youngest boy's
Barlow knife, and his younger sister's picture-book.
To the juvenile imagination of those times, Sheffield
was a huge jack-knife, Colebrook Dale a porridge-

304 A Walk from

pot, and Paternoster Eow a psalm-book, each in the
generative case. How we young reapers used to
discuss the comparative merits and meanings of those
mysterious letters on our sickles, BY and IR ! What
were they ? Were they beginnings of words, or whole
words themselves ? Did they stand for things, quali-
ties, or persons ? " Mine is a By sickle ; mine is an Ir
one. Mine is the best," says the last, " for it has the
finest teeth and the best curve." That was our boys'
talk in walking through the rye, with bent backs and
red faces, a little behind our fathers ; who cut a wider
work to enable us to keep near them.

In what blacksmith shop or hardware house in
America does not Sheffield show its face and faculties ?
Did any American, knowing the difference between
cast-iron and cast-steel, ever miss the sight of Naylor
and Sanderson's yellow labels in his travels ? How
many millions of acres of primeval forest have the
axes edged with their fine steel cut through, and given
to the plough ! Fashion has its Iron Age as well as
its Grolden ; and, what is more remarkable, the first of
the two has come last, in the fitful histories of custom.
And this last freak of feminine taste has brought a
wonderful grist of additional business to the Sheffield
mill. The fair Eugenie has done a good thing for this
smoky town, well deserving of a monument of bur-

London to John O* Groat's. 305

nished steel erected to her memory on one of these
hills. More than this ; as Empress of Crinoline, she
should wear the iron crown of Charlemagne in her own
right. Her husband's empire is but a mere arrondisse-
ment compared with the domain that does homage to
her sceptre. Sheffield is the great arsenal of her arma-
ments. Sheffield cases ships of war with iron plates a
foot thick ; but that is nothing, in pounds avoirdupois,
compared with the weight of steel it spins into elastic
springs for casing the skirts of two hundred millions
of the fair Eugenie's sex and lieges in the two hemi-
spheres. It is estimated that ten thousand tons of steel
are annually absorbed into this use in Christendom ;
and Sheffield, doubtless, furnishes a large proportion of it.
Here I had another involuntary walk, not put down
in the programme of my expectations. On inquiring
the way to Fir Vale, a picturesque suburb where a
friend resided, I was directed to a locality which, it was
suggested, must be the one I meant, though it was
called Fir View. I followed the direction given for a
considerable distance, when it was varied successively
by persons of whom I occasionally inquired. After
ascending and descending a number of steep hills, I
suddenly came down upon the town again from the
south, having made a complete circuit of it; a per-
formance that cost me about two hours of time and

306 A Walk from

much unsatisfactory perspiration. Fearing that a
second attempt would be equally unsuccessful, I took
the Leeds road, and left the Jericho at the first round.
Walked about nine miles to a furnace-lighted village
called very appropriately Hoyland, or Highland, when
anglicised from the Danish. It commands truly a
grand view of wooded hills and deep valleys dashed
with the sheen of ripened grain.

The next day I passed through a good sample
section of England's wealth and industry. Mansions
and parks of the gentry, hill, valley, wheatfields,
meadows of the most vivid green ; crops luxuriant in
most picturesque alternations ; in a word, the whole a
vista of the richest agricultural scenery. And yet out
of the brightest and broadest fields of wheat, barley
and oats, towered up the colliery chimneys in every
direction, like good-natured and swarthy giants
smoking their pipes complacently and " with comfort-
able breasts " in view of the goodly scene. The
golden grain grew thick and tall up to the very pit's
mouth. In the sun-light above and gas-light below
human industry was plying its differently-bitted
implements. There were men reaping and studding
the pathway of their sickles through that field with
thickly-planted sheaves. But right under them, a
hundred fathoms deep, subterranean farmers were at

London to John O 1 Groat's. 307

work, with black and sweaty brows, garnering the
coal-harvest sown there before the Flood. Sickle above
and pick below were gathering simultaneously the
layers of wealth that Nature had stored in her parlor
and cellar for man.

I passed through Barnsley and Wakefield on this
day's walk, towns full of profitable industries and
busy populations, and growing in both after the
American impulse and expansion. If the good " Vicar
of Wakeneld" of the olden time could revisit the
scene of his earthly experience, and look upon the old
church of his ministry as it now appears, renovated
from bottom to the top of its grand and lofty spire, he
would not be entrapped again so easily into assent to
the Greek apothegm of the swindler.

I lodged at a little village inn between Wakeneld
and Leeds, after a day of the most enjoyable walk
that I had made. Never before, between sun and sun,
had I passed over such a section of above-ground and
under-ground industry and wealth. The next morning
I continued northward, and noticed still more striking
combinations of natural productions and human indus-
tries than on the preceding day. One small, rural area
in which these were blended impressed me greatly,
and I stopped to photograph the scene on my mind.
In a circle hardly a third of a mile in diameter, there
x 2

308 A Walk from

was the heaviest crop of oats growing that I had yet
seen in England ; in another part of the same field
there was a large brick-kiln ; in another, an extensive
quarry and machinery for sawing the stone into all
sizes and shapes ; then a furnace for casting iron, and,
lastly, a coal mine ; and all these departments of labor
and production were in full operation^ It is quite
possible that not one of the hundred laborers on and
under this ten-acre patch ever thought it an extraordi-
nary focus of production. Perhaps even the proprietors
and managers of the five different enterprises worked
on the small space had taken its rich and diversified
fertilities as a matter of course, as we take the rain,
light and heat of summer ; but to a traveller " taking
stock " of a country's resources, it could not but be a
point of view exciting admiration. I left it behind me
deeply impressed with the conviction that I had seen
the most productive ten-acre field that could be found
on the surface of the globe, counting in the variety
and value of its surface and sub-surface crops.

I took tea with a friend in Leeds, remaining only
an hour or two in that town, then pursuing my course
northward. The wide world knows so much of Leeds
that any notice that I could give of it might seem
affected and presumptuous. It is to the Cloth- World
what Borne is to the Catholic. Its Cloth Hall is the

London to John O 1 Groat's. 309

St. Peter's of Coat-and-trouserdom. Its river, streams
and canals run black and blue with the stringent
juices of all the woods and weeds of the world used
in dyeing. The wools of all the continents come
floating in here, like baled summer clouds of heaven.
It is a city of magnipotent chimneys ; and they stand
thick and tall on the hills and in the valleys around,
and puff their black breathings into the face and eyes
of the sky above, baconising its countenance, and giving
it no time to wash up and look sober, calm and clean,
except a few hours on the sabbath. The Leeds Mercury
is a power in the land, and everybody who reads the
English language in either hemisphere knows Edward
Baines by name.

As I emerged from the great, busy town on the
north, I passed by the estates and residences of its
manufacturing aristocracy. The homes they have built
and embellished should satisfy the tastes and ambitions
of any hereditary nobility. They need only a little
more age to make them rival many baronial establish-
ments. It is interesting to see how the different classes
of society are stepping into each other's shoes in going
up into higher grades of social life. The merchant and
manufacturing princes of England have not only reached
but surpassed the conditions of wealth, taste and ele-
gance which the hereditary peers of the realm occupied

310 A Walk from

a century ago; while the latter have gone up to the
rich and luxurious surroundings of kings and queens of
that period. The upward movement has reached the
very lowest strata of society. Not only have the small
tradesmen and farmers ascended to the comfortable
conditions of large merchants and landowners of one
hundred years ago, hut common day laborers are lifted
upward by the general uprising. I should not wonder
if all the damp, low, cellarless cottages they now fre-
quently inhabit should be swept away in less than fifty
years and replaced by as comfortable buildings as the
great middle class occupied in the childhood of the
present generation.

I found comfortable quarters for the night in the
little village of Bramhope, about five miles from Leeds.
The next day I walked to Harrowgate, passing through
Otley and across the celebrated Wharf Vale. The scenery
of this valley, as it opens upon you suddenly on descend-
ing from the south into Otley, is exceedingly beautiful ;
not so extensive as that of Belvoir Yale, but with all
the features of the latter landscape compressed in a
smaller space ; like a portrait taken on a smaller scale.
As you look off from the southern ridge or wall of the
valley, you seem to stand on the cord of a segment of
a circle, the radius of which touches the horizon at
about five miles to the north. This crescent is filled

London to John O Groat's. 311

with the most delicate lineaments of Nature's beauty.
The opposite walls of the gallery slope upward from
the meandering wharf so gently and yet reach the blue
ceiling of the sky so near, that all the paintings that
panel them are vividly distinct to your eye, and you
can group all their lights and shades in the compass of
a single glance.

On the opposite side, half hidden and half revealed
among the trees of an ample park, stands Farnley Hall,
a historical residence of an old historical family. I had
a letter of introduction to the present proprietor, Mr.
Fawkes, who, I hope, will not deem it a disparagement
to be called one of the Knights of the Shorthorns, a
more extensive, useful, and cosmopolitan order than
were the Knights of Ehodes or of Malta. Unfortu-
nately for me, he was not at home ; but his steward, a
very intelligent, gentlemanly and genial man, took me
over the establishment, and showed me all the stock
that was stabled, mostly bulls of different ages. They
were all of the best families of Shorthorn blood, and a
better connoisseur of animal life than myself could not
have enjoyed the sight of such well-made creatures
more thoroughly than I did. The prince of the blood,
in my estimation, was "Lord Cobham," a cream-colored
bull, with which compared that famous animal in Greek
mythology which played himself off as such an Adonis

312 A Walk from

among the bovines, must have "been a shabby, scraggy
quadruped. Poor Europa ! it would have been bad
enough if she had been run away with by a " Lord
Cobham." But the like of him did not live in her
day.

After going through the housings for cattle, the
steward took me to the Hall, a grand old mansion full
of English history, especially of the Commonwealth
period. Indeed, one large apartment was a museum
of relics of that stirring and stormy time. There,
against the antique, carved wainscotting, hung the
great broad-brim of Oliver Cromwell, with a circum-
ference nearly as large as an opened umbrella, heavy,
coarse and grim. There hung a sword he wielded in
the fiery rifts of battle. There was Fairfax's sword
hanging by its side; and his famous war-drum lay
beneath. Its leather lungs, that once shouted the
charge, were now still and frowsy, with no martial
speech left in them.

Mr. Fawkes owns about 15,000 acres of land, in-
cluding most of the valley of Otley, and extending
back almost to Harrowgate. He farms about 450
acres, but grows no wheat. Indeed, I did not see a
field of it in a circle of five miles' diameter.

I reached Harrowgate in the dusk of the evening,
and found the town alive with people mostly in the

London to John C? Groat's. 313

streets. It is a snug and cosy little Saratoga among
the hills of Yorkshire, away from the smoke, soot and
savor of the great manufacturing centres. It is a
favorite resort for a mild class of invalids, and of per-
sons who need the medicine of pure air and gentle
exercise, blended with the quiet tonics of cheery mirth
and recreation. Superadded to all these stimulants,
there is a mineral spring at which the visitors, young
and old, drink most voluminously. I went down to it
in the morning before breakfast, and found it thronged
by a multitude of men, women and children, who drank
off great goblets of it with astonishing faith and facility.
The rotunda was so filled with the fumes of sulphur
that I found it more easy to inhale than to imbibe, and
preferred to satisfy that sense as to the merits of the
water.

The next day I reached the brave old city of Eipon.
On the way I stopped an hour or two at Eipley and
visited the castle. The building itself is a good speci-
men of the baronial hall of the olden time. But the
gardens and grounds constitute its distinguishing fea-
ture. I never saw before such an exquisite arrange-
ment of flowers, even at Chats worth or the Kew Gardens.
All forms imaginable were produced by them. The
most extensive and elaborate combination was a row
of flower sofas reaching around the garden. Each was

314 A Walk from

from 20 to 30 feet in length. The seat was wrought
in geraniums of every tint, all grown to an even, com-
pact surface, presenting figures as diversified as the
alternating hues could produce. The back was worked
in taller flowers, presenting the same evenness of line
and surface. On entering the garden gate and catch-
ing the first sight of these beautiful structures, you
take them for veritable sofas, as perfectly wrought as
anything was ever done in Berlin wool.

Ripon is an interesting little city, with a fact-roll of
history reaching back into the dimmest centuries of the
land. It has run the gauntlet of all the Saxon, Danish,
Scotch and Norman raids and regimes. It was burnt
once or twice by each of these races in the struggle for
supremacy. But with a plucky tenacity of life, it arose
successively out of its own ashes and spread its phoenix
wings to a new and vigorous vitality. A venerable
cathedral looks down upon it with a motherly face.
Unique, old buildings, with half their centuries unre-
corded and lost in oblivion, stand to this day in good
repair, as the homes of happy children, who play at
marbles and the last sports of the day just as if they
were born in houses only a year older than themselves.
Institutions and customs older than the cathedral are
kept up with a filial faith in their virtue. One of the
most interesting of these, I believe, was established

London to John O 1 Groat's. 315

by the Saxon Edgar or Alfred it matters not which ;
they were only a century or two apart, and that space
is but a trifling circumstance in the history of this old
country. One of these kings appointed an officer
called a " wakeman " for the town. He must origi-
nally have been a kind of secular beadle of the
community, or a curfew constable, to see the whole
population well a-bed in good season. One of his
duties consisted in blowing a horn every night at nine
o'clock as a signal to turn in. But a remarkable con-
sideration was attached to faithful compliance with this
summons. If any house or shop was robbed before
sunrise, a tax was levied upon every inhabitant of 4d.
if his house had one outer door, and of 8d. if it had
two. This tax was to compensate the sufferer for his
loss, and also to put the whole community under bonds
to keep the peace and to feel responsible for the safety
of each other's property. Thus it not only acted as a
great mutual insurance company of which every house-
holder was a member, but it made him, as it were, a
special constable against burglary. This old Saxon
institution is in full life and vigor to-day. The wake-
man is still the highest secular official of the town.
For a thousand consecutive years the wakeman's toot-
horn has been blown at night over the successive
generations of the little cathedral city. This is an

316 A Walk from

interesting fact, full of promise. No American could
fail to admire this conservatism who appreciates national
individuality. No one, at heart, could more highly
esteem these salient traits of a people's character. And
here I may as well put in a few thoughts on this
subject as at any stage of my walk.

Gk>od-natured reader, are you a man of sensitive
perceptions as to the proprieties and dignities of dress
and deportment which should characterise some great his-
torical personage whose name you have held in profound
veneration all your life long ? Now, in the wayward
drift of your imagination among the freaks of modern
fashion, did it ever dare to present before your eyes
St. Paul in strapped pantaloons, figured velvet vest,
swallow-tailed coat, stove-pipe hat, and a cockney glass
at his eye ? Did your fancy, in its wildest fictions,
ever pass such an image across the speculum of your
mental vision ?

Grentle reader, "in maiden meditation, fancy free,"
did a dreamy thought of yours ever stray through
the histories of your sex and its modes of dress and
adornment, and so blend or transpose them as to
present to you, in a sudden flash of the imagination,
the Virgin Mary dressed like the Empress Eugenie ?
Readers both, did not that fancy trouble you, as if
an unholy thought had fallen into the soul ? Well,

London to John C? Groat's. 317

a thought like that must trouble the American when
his fancy passes before his mind's eye the image of
Old England Americanised. And a faculty more
serious and trusty than fancy will present this trans-
formation to him, day by day, as he visits the great
centres of the nation's life and industry. In London,
Manchester, Liverpool, and all the most busy and
prosperous commercial and manufacturing towns, he
will see that England is becoming Americanised
shockingly fast. In all these populous places it is
losing the old individuality that once distinguished
the grandfatherland of fifty millions who now speak
its language beyond the sea. Look at London ! look
at the miles of three and four storey houses under
the mason's hands, now running out in every direction
from the city. Will you see a single feature of the
Old England of our common memories in them ? No,
not one ! no more than in a modern English dress-
coat, or in one of the iron rails of the British Great
Western, or of the Illinois Central. It is doubtful
if there will be anything of England left in London
at the end of the next fifty years, unless it be the
fog and the Lord Mayor's Show. Already the
radicals are crying out against both of these insti-
tutions, which are merely local, by the way. The
tailor's shears, the mason's trowel, and the carpenter's

318 A Walk from

edge-tools are evenning everything in Christendom
to one dead level of uniformity. The railroads and
telegraphs are all working to the same end. All
these agencies of modern civilization at first lay their
innovating hands upon large cities or commercial
centres. Thence they work outward slowly and
transform the appearance and habits of the country.
The transformations I have noticed in England since
1846, are wonderful, utilitarian, and productive of
absolute and rigid comfort to the people ; still, I
must confess, they inspire in me a sentiment akin
to that which our village fathers experienced when
the old church in which they worshipped from child-
hood was pulled down to make room for a better one.

To every American, sympathising with these senti-
ments, it must be interesting to visit such a rural
little city as Bipon, and find populations that cling
with reverence and affection to the old Saxon institu-
tions of Alfred. It will make him feel that he stands
in the unbroken lineage of the centuries, to hear the
wakeman's horn, and to know that it has been blown,
spring, summer, autumn and winter, in all weathers,
in weal and in woe, for a thousand years. As Old
England is driven farther and farther back from
London, Manchester, Liverpool, and other great im-
proving towns, she will find refuge and residence

London to John Cf Groat's. 319

in these retired country villages. Here she will wear
longest and last the features in which she was engraven
on the minds of all the millions who call her mother
beyond the sea.

The next day I visited the celebrated Fountain
Abbey in Studley Park, a grand relic of antiquity,
framed with silver and emerald work of lakelets, lawns,
shrubberies and trees as beautifully arranged as art,
taste and wealth could set them. The old abbey is a
majestic ruin which fills one with wonder as he looks
up at its broken arches and towers and sees the dimen-
sions marked by the pedestals or foot-prints of its
templed columns. It stands rather in a narrow glen
than in a valley, and was commenced, it is supposed,
about 1130. The yew-trees under which the monks
bivouacked while at work upon the magnificent edifice,
are still standing, bearing leaves as large and green as
those that covered the enthusiastic architects of that
early time. In the height of its prosperity and power,
the lands of the abbey embraced over 72,000 acres.
The Park enclosing this great monument of an earlier
age contains about 250 acres, and is really an earthly
elysium of beauty. It was comforting to learn that it
was laid out so late as 1720, and that all the noble
trees that filled it had grown to their present grandeur
within the intervening period. Here I saw for the

320 A Walk from

first time in England our hard-maple. It was a
spindling thing, looking as if it had suffered much
from fever and ague or rheumatism ; but it was plea-
sant to see it admitted into a larger fellowship of trees
than our New England soil ever bore. On a green,
lawn-faced slope, at the turning of the principal walk,
there was a little tree a few feet high enclosed in by a
circular wire fence. It was planted by the Princess of
Wales on a visit of the royal pair to Studley soon after
their marriage. The fair Dane left her card, in this
way, to the old Abbey, which began to rise upon
its foundations soon after the stalwart Danish sove-
reign of England fell at the Battle of Hastings. Will
any one of her posterity ever bear his name and sit
upon the throne he vacated for that bloody grave ?
No ! she will remember a better name at the font.
The day and the name of the Harolds, Williams,
Henrys, Charles's, and Greorges are over and gone
forever. ALBERT THE GOOD has estopped that succes-
sion ; and England, doubtless, for centuries to come,
will wear that name and its memories in her crown.

After spending a few hours at Studley Park, I
returned to Eipon and went on to Thirsk, where I
spent the Sabbath with a friend. The next day he
drove me over to Rievaulx Abbey, which was the
mother of Fountain Abbey. On the way to it we

London to John O' Croat's. 321

passed the ruins of another of these grand structures
of that religious age, called Byland Abbey, where
Robert Bruce came within an ace of capturing King
Edward on his retreat from Scotland, after the battle
of Bannockburn.

One of the objects of this excursion was to visit the
establishment of Lord Faversham, near Helmsley, who
is one of the most scientific and successful stock-raisers,
of the Shorthorn blood, in England, and to whom I had
a note of introduction. But he, too, was not at home,
which I much regretted, as I was desirous of seeing one
of the peers of the realm who enter into this culture
of animal life with so much personal interest and
assiduity. His manager, however, was very affable
and attentive, ready and pleased to give any informa-
tion desired upon different points. He showed us a
splendid set of animals. Indeed, I had never seen a
herd to equal it. There were several bulls of different
ages with a perfection of form truly admirable.
Some of them had already drawn first prizes at
different shows. Several noble specimens of this
celebrated herd have been sold to stock-raisers in
America, Australia and in continental countries. The
most perfect of all the well-made animals on the estab-
lishment, according to my untrained perceptions of
symmetry, was a milk-white row, called " The Lady

322 A Walk from

in White," three years old. She and Mr. Fawkes'
" Lord Cobham " should be shown together. I doubt
if a better mated pair could be found in England.
There was a large number of cows feeding in the park
which would command admiration at any exhibition of
stock. Lord Faversham's famous " Skyrocket " ended
his days with much eclat. When getting into years,
and into monstrous obesity, he was presented as a
contribution to the Lancashire Distress Fund. Before
passing into the butcher's hands, he was exhibited in
Leeds, and realised about 200 as a show. Thus as a
curiosity first, and as a small mountain of fat beef
afterward, he proved a generous gift to the suffering
operatives in the manufacturing districts.

Passing through the park gate, we entered upon a
lawn esplanade looking down upon the ruins of
Rievaulx Abbey. This broad terrace extended for
apparently a half of a mile, and was as finely carpeted
piece of ground as you will find in England. No hair
of horse or dog groomed or brushed with the nicest care,
and soft and shining with the healthiest vitality, could
surpass in delicacy and life of surface the grass coverlet
of this long terrace, from which you looked down upon
that grand monument of twelfth- century architecture
half veiled among the trees of the glen. This was one
of the oldest abbeys in the north of England, and the

London to John O 1 Groat's. 323

mother of several of them. Some of its walls are still
as entire and perfect as those of Tinturn, on the Wye.
It was founded by the monks of the St. Bernard order,
in 1131, according to the historical record. Really
those black-cowled masons and carvers must have given
the enthusiasm and genius of the early painters of the
Virgin to these magnificent structures. I will not go
into the subject at large here, leaving it to form an
entire chapter, when I have seen most of the old
abbeys of the country. In looking up at their walls,
arches and columns, one marvels to see the most
delicate and elaborate vine and flower-work of the
carver's chisel apparently as perfect as when it
engraved the last line ; and this, too, in face of the
frosts and beating storms of six hundred years. The
largest ivy I ever saw buttressed one of the windowed
walls with ten thousand cross-folded fingers and
foliage of vivid green piled thick and high upon the
teeth-marks of time. The trunk was a full foot
through at the butt. A few years ago a large
mound was uncovered near the ruin, and found to be
composed of cinders, showing incontestably that the
monks had worked iron ore very extensively, thus
teaching the common people that art as well as agricul-
ture. These cinders have been used very largely in
repairing the roads for a considerable distance around.

324 A- Walk from

On returning to Thirsk over the Hambleton range
of Mils, we crossed thousands of acres of moor-land
covered with heather in full bloom, looking like a
purple sea. It was a splendid sight. My friend,
who was an artist, stopped for a while to sketch
one or two views of the scene. As we proceeded, we
saw several green and golden fields impinging upon
this florid waste, serving to illustrate what might be
done with the vast tracts of land in England and
Scotland now bristling with this thick and prickly
vegetation. The heatherland over which we were
passing was utilised in a rather singular manner. It
yielded pasturage to two sets of industrials sheep
and bees. As the heather blossom is thought to
impart a peculiarly pleasant flavor to honey, I was
told many beestock- raisers of Lincolnshire brought
their hives to this section to pasture them for a
season on this purple prairie.

The westward view from the precipitous heights of
the Hambleton ridge is one of the most beautiful and
extensive you will find in England, well worth a special
journey to see it. The declining sun was flooding the
great basin with the day's last, best smile, filling it to
the golden rim of the horizon with a soft light in which
lay a landscape of thirty miles' depth, embracing full
fifty villages and hamlets, parks, plantations and groves,

London to yohn O' Groat's. 325

all looking " like emeralds chased in gold." On the
whole, I am inclined to think many tourists would
regard this view as even superior to that of Belvoir
Yale. It might be justly placed between that and
Wharf Yale.

A London gentleman produced a most unique picture
on the forehead of one of these hills, which may be seen
at a great distance. In the first place, he had a smooth,
lawn-like surface prepared on the steep slope. Then
he cut out the form of a horse in the green turf,
sowing the whole contour of the animal with lime.
This brought out in such bold relief the body and
limbs, that, at several miles' distance, you seem to see
a colossal white horse standing on his four legs, perfect
in form and feature, even to ear and nostril. The
symmetry is perfect, although the body, head, legs and
tail cover a space of four acres !

The next day I took staff for Northallerton, reach-
ing that town about the middle of the afternoon.
Passed through a highly cultivated district, and saw,
for the first time, several reaping machines at work in
the fields. I was struck at the manner in which they
were used. I have noticed a peculiarity in reaping
in this section which must appear singular to an
American. The men cut inward instead of outward,
as with us. And these machines were following the

326 A Walk from

same rule ! As they went around the field, they were
followed or rather met by men and women, each with
an allotted beat, who rushed in behind and gathered
up the fallen from the standing grain so as to make a
clear path for the next round. There seemed to be no
reason for this singular and awkward practice, except
the adhesion to an old custom of reaping. The
grain was not very stout, nor was it lodged.

From Northallerton I hastened on to Newcastle-
upon-Tyne in order to attend, for the first time in my
life, the meetings of the Social Science Congress. I
reached that town on the 25th of August, and re-
mained there a week, enjoying one of the greatest
treats that ever fell to my lot. I will reserve a
brief description of it for a separate chapter at the
end of this volume, if my Notes on other matters do
not crowd it out.

London to John O Groat's. 327

CHAPTER XVi:

HEXIIAM THE NORTH TYNE BORDER-LAND AND ITS SUGGESTIONS

HA WICK TEVIOTDALE BIRTH-PLACE OF LEYDEN MELROSB AND

DRYBURGH ABBEYS ABBOTSFORD : SIR WALTER SCOTT; HOMAGE

TO HIS GENIUS THE FERRY AND THE OAR-GIRL NEW FARM

STEDDINGS SCENERY OF THE TWEED VALLEY EDINBURGH AND

ITS CHARACTERISTICS.

ON Thursday, Sept. 3rd, I left Newcastle, aiid
proceeded first westward to the old town of
Ilexham, with the view of taking a more central
route into Scotland. Here, too, are the ruins of one
of the most ancient of the abbeys. The parish church
wears the wrinkles of as many centuries as the oldest
in the land. Indeed, the town is full of antiquities
of different dates and races, lloman, Scotch, Saxon,
Danish and Norman. They all left the marks of their
glaived hands upon it.

From Hexham I faced northward and followed the
North Tyne up through a very picturesque and
romantic valley, thickly wooded and studded with
baronial mansions, parks, castles and residences of
gentry, with comfortable farm-houses looking sunny

328 A Walk from

and cheerful on the green hill slopes and on the quiet
banks of the river. I saw fields of wheat quite green,
looking as if they needed another month's sun to fit
them for harvesting. Lodged in a little village about
eight miles from Hexham. The next day walked on
to the little hamlet of Fallstones, a distance of about
twenty miles. As I ascended the valley, the scene
changed rapidly. The river dwindled to a narrow
stream. The hills that walled it on either side grew
higher and balder, and the clouds lay cold and dank
upon their bleak and sullen brows. The hamlets
edged in here and there grew thinner, smaller and
shabbier. The road was barred and gated about once
in a mile, to keep cattle and sheep from wandering ;
there being no fences nor hedges running parallel with
it. In a word, the premonitory symptoms of a bare
border-land thickened at every turn.

Another day brought me into the midst of a wild
region, which might be called No-man's-land ; although
most of it belongs to the Duke of Northumberland. It
is all in the solitary grandeur of heather-haired hills,
which tinge, with their purple flush, the huge, black-
winged clouds that alight upon them. Only here and
there a shepherd's cottage is to be seen half way up the
heights, or sheltering itself in a clump of trees in glen
or gorge, like a benighted traveller bivouacking for a

London to John O Groat's. 329

night in a desert. Sheep, of the Cheviot breed mostly,
are nearly the sole inhabitants and industrials of this
mountainous waste. They climb to the highest peaks
and bring down the white wealth of their wool to man.
It was pleasant to see them like walking mites, flecking
the dark brows of the mountains. They made a
picture ; they made a tableau muant of the same
illustration as Landseer's lamb looking into the grass-
covered cannon's mouth.

This is the Border-land! Here the fiercest anta-
gonisms of hostile nationalities met in deadly conflict.
Fire and blood, rapine and wrath blackened and
reddened and ravaged for centuries across this bleak
territory. Robber-chieftains and knighted free-booters
carried on their guerilla raids backward and forward,
under the counterfeited banner of patriotism. Scotch
and English armies led by kings marched and counter-
marched over this sombre boundary. Never before was
there one apparently more insoluble as a barrier
between two peoples. Never before in Christendom
was there one that required a longer space of time to
melt. Never before did the fusing of two nationalities
encounter more fierce and prolonged opposition. Did
ever patriotism pour out a swifter and deeper tide of
chivalrous sentiment against merging one in another ?
against uniting two thrones and two peoples in one ?

330 A Walk from

Did patriotism ever fight bloodier battles to prevent
such a union, or cling to local sovereignty with a
more desperate hold ?

This is the Border-land! Look up the purpled
steeps of these heathered hills. The white lambs are
looking, with their soft, meek eyes, into the grass-
choked mouths of the rusty and dismantled cannon
of the war of nationalities between England and Scot-
land. The deed has been consummated. The valor
and patriotism of Wallace and Bruce could not pre-
vent it. The sheep of English and Scotch shepherds
feed side by side on these mountain heights, in spite of
Stirling and Bannockburn, of Flodden and Falkirk.
The Iron Horse, bearing the blended arms of the two
realms on his shield, walks over those battle-fields by
night and day, treading their memories deeper and
deeper in the dust. The lambs are playing in the sun
on the boundary line of the two dominions. Does a
Scot of to-day love his native land less than the Camp-
bell clansman or clan-chief in Bruce's time? Not a
whit. He carries a heartful of its choicest memories
with him into all countries of his sojourning. But
there is a larger sentiment that includes all these filial
feelings toward his motherland, while it draws addi-
tional warmth and strength from them. It is the sen-
timent of Imperial Nationality ; the feeling of a Briton,

London to John O"Groafs. 331

that does not extinguish nor absorb, nor compete with,
the Scot in his heart ; the feeling that he is a political
constituent of a mighty nation, whose feet stand upon
all the continents of the earth, while it holds the best
islands of the sea in its hands ; the feeling with which
he says We with all the millions of a dominion on which
the sun never sets, and Our, when he speaks of its
grand and common histories, its hopes, prospects, pro-
gress, power and aspirations.

There was a Border-land, dark and bloody, between
Saxon England and Celtic Wales. For centuries the
red foot-marks of savage conflict scarred and covered its
wild war er before did so small a people make

so stout, and desperate and protracted struggle for
local independence and isolation. Never did one pro-
duce a more strong-hearted and blind-eyed patriotism,
or patriotism more poets to thrill the listeners to their
lays with the intoxicating fanaticism of a national
sentiment. On that Border-land the white lambs
now He in the sun. The Welsh sentiment is as strong
as ever in the Snowden shepherd, and he may not
speak a dozen words of the English tongue. But the
Briton lives in his breast. The feeling of its great
meaning surrounds and illumines the inner circles of his
local attachment. He may never have seen a map of
the Globe, and never have been outside the wall of the

332 A Walk from

Welsh mountains ; but he knows, without geography,
who and what Queen. Victoria is among the earth's
sovereigns, and the length and breadth of her sceptre's
reach and rule around the world.

There was a Border-land between Britain and
Ireland, blackened and scarred with more burning
antagonisms than those that once divided the larger
island. The record of several consecutive centuries
is graven deep in it by the brand and bayonet, and
by the more incisive teeth-marks of hate. The slum-
bering antipathies of race and religion even now crop
out here and there over the unfused boundary in his-
sing tongues of flame. The Briton and the Celt are
still struggling for the precedence in the Irishman's
breast ; but it is not a war of extermination. His
ardent nature is given to martial memories, and all
the battles he boasts of are British battles, in which
he or his father played the hero number one. The
history of independent Ireland is poor and thin ; still
he holds it back in his heart, and hesitates to link it
with the great annals of the " Saxon " realm, and
thus make of both one grand and glorious record,
present and future. He cannot yet make up his
mind to say We with all the other English-speaking
millions of the empire, as the Scotsman and Welsh-
man have learned and loved to say it. He cannot

London to John Cf Groat's. 333

as yet say Our with them with such a sentiment of
joint interest, when the histories, hopes, expansion and
capacities of that empire unroll their vista before him.
But the rains and the dews of a milder century are
falling upon this Border-land. The lava of spent
volcanoes that covered it is taking soil and seed of
green vegetation. The white lambs shall yet lie on
it in the sun.

What a volume might be filled with the succinctest
history of the Border-lands of Christendom ! France
was intersected with them for centuries. Seemingly
they were as implacable and obdurate as any that
ever divided the British isle. Local patriotism wrote
poetry and shed blood voluminously to prevent the
fusion of these old landmarks of pigmy nationalities.
It took nearly a thousand years to complete the
blending ; to make the ice and the our of one great
consolidated empire the largest political sentiment of
the man of Normandy, Burgundy or Navarre. Long
and fierce, and seemingly endless was the struggle ;
but at last, on all these old obstinate boundaries of
hostile principalities, the white lambs lay in the sun.

There are Border-lands now in the south and east
of Europe foaming and seething with the same an-
tagonisms of race and language ; and Christendom
is tremulous with their emotion. It is the same old

334 A Walk from

struggle over again ; and yet ninety-nine in a hundred
of intelligent and reading people, with the history
of British and French Border-lands before them,
seem to think that a new and strange thing has
happened under the sun. Full that proportion of
our English-speaking race, in both hemispheres, closing
the volume of its own annals, have made up their
minds to the belief that these Border-lands between
German and Magyar, Teuton and Latin, Buss and
Pole, bristle with antagonisms the like of which
never were subdued, and never ought to be subdued
by human means or motives. To them, naturally, the
half century of this hissing and seething, insurrection
and repression, is longer than the five hundred years
and more it took to fuse into one the nationalities of
England and Wales. What a point of space is a
century midway between the ninth and the nineteenth !
Few are long-sighted enough in historic vision to
touch that point with a cambric needle. It may seem
unfeeling to say it or think it ; still it is as true as
the plainest history of the last millenium. There is
a patriotism that looks at the future through a gimlet
hole, and sees in it but a single star. That patriotism
is a natural and most popular sentiment. It was
strong in the Welshman's breast a thousand years
ago, and in the Scotsman's half that distance back

London to John O' Groat's. 335

in the past. But it IB a patriotism that has its day
and its rule ; then both its eyes are opened, and it
looks upon the firmament of the future broadside on,
and sees a constellation where it once saw and half
worshipped a solitary star. Better to be the part of
a great WHOLE than the whole of a little nothing.

These continental Border-lands may see the faces
of their future history in the mirror of England's
annals. They are quaking now with the impetuous
emotions of local nationality. They are blackened
and scarred in the contest for the Welsh and Scotch
independence of centuries agone. But over those
boundary wastes the grass shall yet grow soft, fair
and green, and there, too, the white lambs shall lie
in the sun.

My walk lay over the most inhospitable and un-
peopled section I ever saw. Calling at a station on
the railway that passes through it, I was told by the
master that the nearest church or chapel was sixteen,
miles in one direction, and over twenty in another. It
is doubtful if so large a churchless space could be found
in Iowa or even Kanzas. I was glad to reach Hawick,
a good, solid town but a little way inside of the Scottish
border, where I spent the sabbath and the following
Monday. This was a rallying and sallying point in
the old Border "Wars, and was inundated two or three

336 A Walk from

times by the flux and reflux .,of this conflict, having
been burnt twice, and put under the ordeal of other
calamities brought upon it when free-booting was both
the business occupation and pastime of knighted chief-
tains and their clansmen. It is now a thrifty, manu-
facturing town, lying in the trough of the sea, or of
the lofty hills that resemble waves hardened to earth
in their crests. Just opposite the Temperance Inn in
which I had my quarters, was the Tower Hotel, once
a palatial mansion of the Buccleuchs. There the
Duchess of Monmouth used to hold her drawing-rooms
in an apartment which many a New England journey-
man mechanic would hardly think ample and comfort-
able enough for his parlor. There is a curious conical
mound in the town, called the Moat-hill, which looks
like a great, green carbuncle. It is thought by some
to be a Druidical monument, but is quite involved
in a mystery which no one has satisfactorily solved.
It is strange that no persistent and successful effort
has been made to let day-light through it. Some
workmen a long time ago undertook to perforate it,
but were frightened away by a thunder-storm, which
they seemed to take as a reproof and threatened
punishment for their profanity. The great business
of Hawick is the manufacture of a woollen fabric
called Tweeds. It came to this name in a singular

London to John G 1 Groat's.

337

way. The clerk of the factory made out an invoice of
the first lot to a London house under the name of
Twilled goods. The London man read it Tweeds,
instead of Twilled, and ever since they have gone by
that title. As Sir Walter Scott was at that time
making the name "Tweed" illustrious, the mistake
was a very lucrative one to the manufacturers of the
article. Here, too, in this border town commences
that chain of birth-places of eminent men, who have
honored Scotland with their lives and history. Here
was born James Wilson, once the editor of The Econo-
mist, who worked his way up, through intermediate
positions of public honor and trust, to that of Finance
Minister for India, and died at the meridian of his
manhood in that country of dearly-bought distinctions.
On Tuesday, Sept. 8th, I commenced my walk
northward from this threshold town of Scotland. Fol-
lowed down the Teviot to Denholm, the birth-place
of the celebrated poet and linguist, Dr. John Leyden,
another victim who offered himself a sacrifice to the
costly honors and emoluments of East Indian official
life. One great thought fired his soul in all the
perils and privations of that deadly climate. It was
to ascend one niche higher in knowledge of oriental
tongues than Sir William Jones. He labored to this
owl with a desperate assiduity that perhaps was never

338 A Walk from

surpassed or even equalled. He died hugging the
conviction that he had attained it. This little village
was his birth-place. Here he wrote his first rhymes,
and- wooed and won the first inspirations of the muse.
His heart, as its last pulses grew weaker and slower,
in that far-off heathen land, took on its child-thoughts
again and its child-memories ; and his last words
were about this little, rural hamlet where he was born.
A beautiful monument has been erected to his memory
in the centre of the large common around which the
village is built. On each of the four sides of the
monument there is a tribute to his name and worth ;
one from Sir Walter Scott, and one taken from his
own poems, entitled " Scenes of my Infancy," a touch-
ing appeal to his old friends and neighbors to hold
him in kind remembrance.

All this section is as fertile as it can be with the
sceneries and historical associations favorable for in-
spiring a strong-hearted love of country, and for the
development of the poetry of romantic patriotism.
It was pleasant to emerge from the dark, cold, barren
border-land, from the uncivilised mountains, standing
sullen in the wild, shaggy chevelurc of nature, and to
walk again between towering hills dressed in the best
toilet of human industry, crowned with golden wheat-
fields, and zoned with broad girdles of the greenest

London to John O* Groat's. 339

vegetation. It is when these contrasts are suddenly
and closely brought within the same vista that one
sees and feels how the Creator has honored the labor
of human hands, and lifted it up into partnership with
His omnipotences in chronicling the consecutive cen-
turies of the earth in illuminated capitals of this joint
handwriting. It is a grand and impressive sight one
of those dark-browed hills of the Border-land, bearded
to its rock-ridged forehead with such bush-bristles and
haired with matted heather. In nature it is what a
painted Indian squaw in her blanket, eagle feathers
and moccasins is in the world of humanity. We look
upon both with a species of admiration, as contrasts
with objects whose worth is measured by the com-
parison. The Empress Eugenie and the Princess
of Wales, and wives and sisters lovelier still to the
circles of humble life, look more beautiful and graceful
when the eye turns to them from a glance at the best-
looking squaw of the North American wilds. And so
looked the well-dressed hills on each side of the Teviot,
compared with the uncultured and stunted mountains
among which I had so recently walked.

Ascending from Teviotdale, I passed the Earl of

Minto's seat, a large and modern-looking mansion,

surrounded with beautiful grounds and noble trees, and

commanding a grand and picturesque view of valley

z2

340 A Walk from

and mountain from an excellent point of observation.
As soon as I lost sight of Teviotdale another grand
vista of golden and purpled hills and rich valleys burst
upon my sight as suddenly as theatrical sceneries are
shifted on the stage. Dined in a little, rural,
unpoetical village bearing the name of Lilliesleaf.
Resuming . my walk, I soon came in sight of the grand
valley of the Tweed, a great basin of natural beauty,
holding, as it were, Scotland's " apples of gold in
pictures of silver." Every step commanded some new
feature of interest. Here on the left arose to the still,
blue bosom of the sty the three great Eildon Hills, with
their heads crowned with heather as with an emerald
diadem. The sun is low, and the far-off village in the
valley shows dimly between the daylight and the dark-
ness. There is the shadow of a broken edifice, broken
but grand, that arises out of the midst of the low
houses. A little farther on, arches and the stone vein-
work of glassless windows, and ivy-netted towers come
out more distinctly. I recognise them at the next furlong.
They stand thus in pictures hung up in the parlors of
thousands of common homes in America, Australia and
India. They are the ruins of Melrose Abbey. Here
is the original of the picture. I see it at last, as
thousands of Americans have seen it before. In history
and association it is to them the Westminster Abbey of

London to John O Groat's. 341

Scotland, but in ruin. It looks natural, though not at
first glance what one expected. The familiar engraving
does not give us the real flesh and blood of the
antiquity, or the complexion of the stone ; but it does
not exaggerate the exquisite symmetries and artistic
genius of the structure. These truly inspire one with
wonder. They are all that pen and pencil have
described them. The great window, which is the
most salient feature in the common picture, is a magni-
ficent piece of work in stone, twenty-four feet in height
and sixteen in breadth. It is all in the elm-tree order
of architecture. The old monks belonged to that
school, and they wrought out branches, leaves and
leaf- veins, and framed the lacework of their chisels with
colored glass most exquisitely.

Melrose Abbey was the eldest daughter, I believe,
of Bievaulx Abbey, in Yorkshire, which has already
been noticed; a year or two older in its foundation
than Fountain Abbey, in Studley Park. The fecundity
with which these ecclesiastical buildings multiplied and
replenished England and Scotland is a marvel, con-
sidering the age in which they were erected and the
small population and the poverty of the country. But
something on this aspect of the subject hereafter. Here
lie the ashes of Scottish kings, abbots and knights
whose names figured conspicuously in the history of

342 A Walk from

public and private wars which cover such a space of
of the country's life as an independent nation. The
Douglas family especially with several of its branches
found a resting-place for their dust within these walls.
Built and rebuilt, burnt and reburnt, mutilated, dis-
membered, consecrated and desecrated make up the
history of Jthis celebrated edifice, and that of its like,
from Land's End to John O'Groat's. It is a slight but
a very appreciable mitigation of these destructive acts
that it was ruined artistically ; just as some enthusiastic
castle and abbey-painter would have suggested.

Although I spent the night at Melrose, it was a dark
and cloudy one, so that I could not see the abbey by
moonlight a view so much prized and celebrated.
The next day I literally walked from morning till
evening among the tombstones of antiquity and monu-
ments of Scotch history invested with an interest which
will never wane. In the first place, I went down the
Tweed a few miles and crossed it in a ferry-boat to see
Dryburgh Abbey. Here, embowered among the trees
in a silver curve of the river, stands this grand monu-
ment of one of the most remarkable ages of the world.
Within an hour's walk from Melrose, and four or five
years only after the completion of that edifice, the
foundations of this were laid. It is astonishing. We
will not dwell upon it now, but make a separate

London to JoJm Cf Groat's. 343

chapter on it when I have seen most of the other ruins
of the kind in the kingdom. The French are given to
the habit of festooning the monuments and graves of
their relatives and friends with immortelles. Nature has
hung one of hers to Dryburgh Abbey. It is a yew-
tree opposite the door by which you enter the ruins.
The year-rings of its trunk register all the centuries
that the stones of the oldest wall have stood imbedded
one upon the other. The tree is still green, putting
forth its leaf in its season. But there is an immortelle
hung to these dark, crumbling walls that shall outlive
the greenest trees now growing on earth. Here, in a
little vaulted chapel, or rather a deep niche in the wall,
lie the remains of Sir Walter Scott, his wife and the
brilliant Lockhart. How many thousands of all lands
where the English language is spoken will come and
stand here in mute and pensive communion before the
iron gate of this family tomb and look through the
bars upon this group of simply-lettered stones !

From Dryburgh I walked back to Melrose on the
east side of the Tweed. Lost the foot-path, and for
two hours clambered up and down the precipitous cliffs
that rise high and abrupt from the river. In many
places the zig-zag path was cut into the rock, hardly a
foot in breadth, overhanging a precipice which a person
of weak nerves could hardly face with composure. At

344 A Walk from

last got out of these dark fastnesses and ascended a
range of lofty hills where I found a good carriage road.
This elevation commanded the most magnificent view
that I ever saw in Scotland, excepting, perhaps, the
one from Stirling Castle only for the feature which the
Forth supplies. It was truly beautiful beyond descrip-
tion, and it would be useless for me to attempt one.

After dinner in Melrose, I resumed my walk north-
ward and came suddenly upon Abbotsford. Indeed,
I should have missed it, had I not noticed a wooden
gate open on the roadside, with some directions upon
it for those wishing to visit the house. As it stands
low down towards the river, and as all the space above
it to the road is covered with trees and shrubbery, it
is entirely hidden from view in that direction. The
descent to the house is rather steep and long. And
here it is ! Abbotsford ! It is the photograph of Sir
Walter Scott. It is brim full of him and his histories.
No author's pen ever gave such an individuality to a
human home. It is all the coinage of thoughts that
have flooded the hemispheres. Pages of living litera-
ture built up all these lofty walls, bent these arches,
panelled these ceilings, and filled the whole edifice with
these mementoes of the men and ages gone. Every
one of these hewn stones cost a paragraph ; that carved
and gilded crest, a column's length of thinking done on

London to Joint O 1 Groat's.

345

paper. It must be true that pure, unaided literary
labor never built before a mansion of this magnitude
and filled it with such treasures of art and history.
This will forever make it and the pictures of it a monu-
ment of peculiar interest. I have said that it is brim
full of the author. It is equally full of all he wrote
about ; full of the interesting topographs of Scotland's
history, back to the twilight ages ; full inside and out,
and in the very garden and stable walls. The studio
of an artist was never fuller of models of human or
animal heads, or of counterfeit duplicates of nature's
handiwork, than Sir Walter's mansion is of things his
pen painted on in the long life of its inspirations. The
very porchway that leads into the house is hung with
petrified stag-horns, doubtless dug up in Scottish bogs,
and illustrating a page of the natural history of the
country in some pre-historic century. The halls are
panelled with Scotland, with carvings in oak from the
old palace of Dunfermline. Coats of arms of the
celebrated Border chieftains are arrayed in line around
the walls. The armoury is a miniature arsenal of all
arms ever wielded since the time of the Druids. And
a history attaches to nearly every one of the weapons.
History hangs its webwork everywhere. It is built,
high and low, into the face of the outside walls.
Quaint, old, carved stones from abbey and castle ruins,

346 A Walk from

arms, devices and inscriptions are all here presented to
the eye like the printed page of an open volume.
Among the interesting relics are a chair made from the
rafters of the house in which Wallace was betrayed,
Rob Roy's pistol, and the key of the old Tolbooth of
Edinburgh.

I was conducted through the rooms opened to visitors
by a very gentlemanly-looking man, who might be
taken for an author himself, from his intellectual ap-
pearance and conversation. The library is the largest
of all the apartments fifty feet by sixty. Nor is it
too large for the collection of books it contains, which
numbers about 20,000 volumes, many of them very
rare and valuable. But the soul-centre of the building
to me was the study, opening into the library. There
is the small writing-table, and there is the plain arm-
chair in which he sat by it and worked out those
creations of fancy which have excited such interest
through the world. That square foot over against
this chair, where his paper lay, is the focus, the point
of incidence and reflection, of thoughts that pencilled
outward, like sun-rays, until their illumination
reached the antipodes, thoughts that brought a plea-
sant shining to the sun-burnt face of the Australian
shepherd as he watched his flock at noon from under
the shadow of a stunted tree ; thoughts which made

London to John O 1 Croat's. 347

a cheery fellowship at night for the Hudson Bay
hunter, in his snow-buried cabin on the Sakatchiwine.
The books of this little inner library were the body-
guard of his genius, chosen to be nearest him in the
outsallyings of his imagination. Here is a little con-
versational closet, with a window in it to let in the
leaf-sifted light and air a small recess large enough
for a couple of chairs or so, which he called a " Speak-
a-bit" Here is something so near his personality
that it almost startles you like a sudden apparition
of himself. It is a glass case containing the clothes
he last wore on earth the large-buttoned, blue coat,
the plaid trousers, the broad-brimmed hat, and heavy,
thick-soled shoes which he had on when he came in
from his last walk to lay himself down and die.

On signing my name in the register, I was affected
at a coincidence which conveyed a tribute of respect
to the memory of the great author of striking signi-
ficance, while it recorded the painful catastrophe which
has broken over upon the American Republic. It was
a sad sight to me to see the profane and suicidal
antagonisms which have rent it in twain brought
to the shrine of this great memory and graven upon
its sacred tablet as it were with the murdering dagger's
point. New and bad initials ! The father and patriot
Washington would have \vept tears of blood to have

348 A Walk from

read them here, to have read them anywhere, bearing
such deplorable meaning. They were U. -S. A. and
C. S. A., as it were chasing each other up and down
the pages of the visitors' register. Sad, sad was the
sight sadder, in a certain sense, than the smoke-
wreaths of the Tuscarora and Alabama ploughing the
broad ocean with their keels. U. S. A. and C. S. A. !
What initials for Americans to write, with the precious
memories of a common history and a common weal
still held to their hearts to write here or anywhere !
What a riving and a ruin do those letters record !
Still they brought in their severed hands a common
homage-gift to the memory of the Writer of Abbots-
ford. If they represented the dissolution of a great
political fabric, in which they once gloried with equal
pride, they meant union here a oneness indissoluble
in admiration for a great genius whose memory can
no more be localised to a nation than the interest of
his works.

American names, both of the North and South, may
be found on almost every page of the register.. I wrote
mine next to that of a gentleman from Worcester,
Mass., my old place of residence, who only left an hour
before my arrival. Abbotsford and Stratford-upon-
Avon are points to which our countrymen converge
in their travels in this country ; and you will find

London to John C? Groat's. 349

more of their signatures in the registry of these two
haloed homesteads of genius than anywhere else in
Europe.

The valley of the Tweed in this section is all an
artist would delight in as a surrounding of such his-
tories. The hills are lofty, declining into gorges or
dells at different angles with the river, which they wall
in precipitously with their wooded sides in many places.
They are mostly cultivated to the top, and now in
harvest many of them were crowned with stocked
sheaves of wheat, each looking in the distance like
Nature with her golden curls done up in paper,
dressing for the harvest-home of the season. Some
of them wore belts and gores of turnip foliage of dif-
ferent nuances of green luxuriance, combining with
every conceivable shade and alternation of vegetable
coloring. Indeed, as already intimated, the view from
the eminence almost overhanging the little sequestered
peninsula on which Old Melrose stood twelve centuries
ago is indescribably beautiful, and well worth a long
journey to see, disconnected from its historical associa-
tions. The Eildon Hills towering up heather-crowned
to the height of over 1,300 feet above the level of the
sea, right out of the sheen of barley fields, as from a
sea of silver, form one of the salient features of this
glorious landscape. This is an interesting peculiarity

35O A Walk from

of Scotch scenery ; civilization sapping the barbarism
of the wilderness ; wheat-fields mordant biting in upon
peaty moorlands, or climbing to the tops of cold, bald
mountains, shearing off their thorny locks of heather
and covering them with the well-dressed chevelnre of
yellow grain. Where the farmer's horse cannot climb
with the plough, or the lithe sheep cannot graze to
advantage, human hands plant the Scotch larch or fir,
just as a tenant-gardener would set out cabbage-plants
at odd corners of his little holding which he could have
no other use for.

Abbotsferry is just above Abbotsford, and is crossed
in a small row-boat. The river here is of considerable
width and quite rapid. The boat was kept on the
other side ; so I halooed to a man engaged in thatching
a rick of oats to come and ferry me over. Without
descending from the ladder, he called to some one in
the cottage, when, to my surprise, a well-dressed young,
woman, in rather flowing dress, red jacket, and with
her hair tastefully done up in a net d-la-modc, made
her appearance. Descending to the river, she folded
up her gown, and, setting herself to the oars, " pushed
her light shallop from the shore" with the grace of The
Lady of the Lake. In a few minutes she ran the prow
upon the pebbly beach at my feet, and I took my seat
at the other end of the boat. She did it all so

London to John OGroafs. 351

naturally, and without any other flush upon her
pleasant face than that of the exercise of rowing, that
I felt quite easy myself and checked the expression of
regret I was on the point of uttering for putting her to
such service. A few questions convinced me it was her
regular employment, especially when her father was
busy. I could not help asking her if she had ever
read " The Lady of the Lake," but found that neither
that romance nor any other had ever invested her river
experience with any sensibility except of a cheerful
duty. She was going to do the whole for a penny, her
usual charge, but I declined to take back any change
for the piece of silver I gave to her, intimating
that I regarded it cheap at that to be rowed over a
river by such hands.

Almost opposite to Abbotsford I passed one of the
best farming establishments I had seen in Scotland.
I was particularly struck with a feature which will
hereafter distinguish the steddings or farm buildings
in Great Britain. Steam has already accomplished
many changes, and among others one that could hardly
have been anticipated when it was first applied to com-
mon uses. It has virtually turned the threshing-floor
out of doors. Grain growing has become completely
out-of-door work, from seeding to sending to market.
The day of building two-story barns for storing and

35 2 ^ Walk from

threshing wheat, barley and oats is over, I am per-
suaded, in this country. A quadrangle of slate-roofed
cow-sheds, for housing horses and cattle, will displace
the old-fashioned barns, each with its rood of roof.
This I saw on crossing the Tweed was quite new,
and may serve as a model of the housing that will
come into vogue rapidly. One familiar with New
England in the " old meeting-house " time, would
call this establishment a hollow square of horse-sheds,
without a break or crevice at the angles.

I reached Galashiels about 5 P.M., and stopped an
hour for tea. This is a vigorous and thrifty town,
that makes a profitable and useful business of the
manufacture of tweeds, tartans and shawls. It is
situated on the banks of the Grala, a little, rapid, shal-
low river that joins the Tweed about a mile below.
After tea I resumed my walk, but, owing to the con-
fused direction of the landlady, took the wrong side of
the river, and diverged westward toward Peebles. I
had made three miles or more in this direction before
I found out my mistake, so was obliged to return to
Gralashiels, where I concluded to spend the night, after
another involuntary excursion more unsatisfactory than
my walk around Sheffield, inasmuch as I had to travel
over the same road twice for the whole distance. Thus
the three mistakes thus far made have cost me twenty

London to John O Groat's. 353

miles of extra footing. The next morning I set out in
good season, determined to reach Edinburgh, if possible,
by night.

Followed the Grala Water, as it is called here, just
as if it were a placid lake or land-locked bay, though
it is a tortuous and swift-running stream. The scenery
was still picturesque, in some places very grand and
romantic. There was one great amphitheatre just
before reaching the village of Stow which was pecu-
liarly interesting. It was a great bowl full of earth's
glory up to the very rim. The circular wall was
embossed with the best patterns and colors of vegeta-
tion. The hills of every tournure showed each in a fir
setting, looking, with their sloping fields of grain, like
inverted goblets of gold vined with emerald leaf-work.
In the valley a reaping-machine was at work with its
peculiar chatter and clatter, and men and women were
following in its wake, gathering up and binding the
grain as it fell and clearing the way for the next
round. Up and down these hills frequently runs a
stripe of Scotch firs or larches a few rods wide ; here
and there they resemble those geometrical figures often
seen in gardens and pleasure grounds. The sun peep-
ing out of the clouds, and flooding these features with
a sudden and transient river of light, gives them a
glow and glory that would delight the artist. After

354 ^ Walk from

a long walk through such scenery, I reached, late in
the evening, Auld Reekie, a favorite home-name which
the modern Athenians love to give to Edinburgh.
Being anxious to push on and complete my journey
as soon as practicable, I only remained in the cele-
brated Scotch metropolis one night, taking staff early
next morning, and holding northward toward the
Highlands.

Edinburgh has made its mark upon the world and
its place among the great centres of the world's civili-
zation. On the whole, no city in Great Britain, or in
Christendom, has ever attained to such well-developed,
I will not say angular, but salient individuality. This
is deep-featured and ineffaceable. It is, not was.
Edinburgh has reared great men prolifically and sup-
plied the world with them, and kept always a good
number back for itself to give a shaping to others the
world needed. Its prestige is great in the production
of such intellects. But it keeps up with the times.
It is faithful to its antecedents, and appreciates them
at their full value and obligation. It does not lie a-bed
until noon because it has got its name up for educating
brilliant minds. Its grand, old University holds its
own among the wranglers of learning. Its High School
is proportionately as high as ever, notwithstanding the
rapid growth of others of the same purpose. Its Pulpit

London to John O' Croat's. 355

boasts of its old mind-power and moral stature. Its
Theology stands iron-cabled, grand and solid as an
iceberg in the sea of modern speculation, unsoftened
under the patter of the heterodox sentimentalities of
human philanthropy. It is growing more and more
a City of Palaces. And the palaces are all built for
housing the poorest of the poor, the weakest of the
weak and the vilest of the vile. These hospitals are
the Holyroods of Edinburgh II. They honor it witli
a renown better than the royal palace of the latter
name ever won.

I said, Edinburgh the Second. That is correct.
There are two towns, the Old and the New ; the last
about half a century's age. But the oldest will be the
youngest fifty years hence. The hand of a " higher
civilization," with its spirit-level, pick, plane and trowel
is upon it with the grip of a Samson. That hand will
tone down its great distinctive individualities and give
it the modern unity of design, face and feature. All
these tall houses, built skyward layer upon layer or
flat upon flat, until they show half a dozen stories on
one street, and twice that number on the other, are
doomed, and they will be done for, one by one in its
turn. They probably came in with Queen Mary, ami
they will go out under the blue-oytnl Alexandra. Thoy
will be supplanted by the most improved architecture

356 A Walk from

of modern taste and utilitarianism. Edinburgh will be
Anglicised and put in the fashionable costume of a pro-
gressive age ; in the same swallow-tailed coat, figured
vest and stove-pipe hat worn by London, Liverpool and
Manchester. It will not be allowed to wear tweed
pantaloons except for one circumstance ; that it is
now building its best houses of stone instead of brick.

But there are physical features that will always dis-
tinguish Edinburgh from all other cities of the world
and which no architectural changes can ever obliterate
or deface. There are Arthur's Seat, Salisbury Crags,
the Calton Hill, and the Castle Height, and there they
will stand forever the grandest surroundings and gar-
niture of Nature ever given to any capital or centre
of the earth's populations.

London to John O' Groat's.

357

CHAPTEE XVII.

LOCH LEVJEN ITS ISLAND CASTLE STRATHS PERTH SALMON-BREEDINO

THOUGHTS ON FISH-FAKMING DUJJKELD BLAIR ATHOLL DUCAL

TREE-PLANTER STRATHSPEY AND ITS SCENERY THE ROADS

SCOTCH CATTLE AND SHEEP NIGHT IN A WAYSIDE COTTAGE

ARRIVAL AT INVERNESS.

ON Friday, Sept. llth, I left for the north the
morning after my arrival in Edinburgh, hoping
to finish my long walk before the rainy season com-
menced. My old friend and host accompanied me
across the Forth, l>y the Grranton Ferry, and walked
with me for some distance on the other side ; then
bidding me God-speed, he returned to the city. The
weather was fine, and the farmers were very busy
at work. A vast quantity of grain, especially of oats,
was cut and ready for carting ; but little of it had
been ricked in consequence of frequent showers. I
noticed that they used a diiferent snath for their
scythes here from that common in England. It is
in two parts, like the handles of a plough, joining
a foot or two above the blade. One is shorter than
the other, each having a thole. It is a singular con-

358 A Walk from

trivance, but seems to be preferred here to the old
English pole. I have never seen yet an American
scythe-snath in England or Scotland, although so
much of our implemental machinery has been intro-
duced. American manure-forks and hay-forks, axes
and augurs you will now find exposed for sale in
nearly every considerable town, but one of our beauti-
fully mounted scythes would be a great novelty here.

The scenery varies, but retains the peculiarly Scotch
features. Hills which we should call mountains are
frequently planted with trees as far up as the soil
will lie upon the precipitous sides. On passing one
of great height, bald at the top, but bearded to the
eyebrows with fir and larch, I asked an elderly man,
a blacksmith, standing in his shop door, if they were
a natural growth. He said that he and his two
boys planted them all about forty-eight years ago.
They were now worth, on an average, twelve English
shillings, or about three dollars apiece.

I lodged in Kinross, a pleasant-faced, quiet and
comfortable little town, done up with historical asso-
ciations of special interest. Here is Loch Leven,
serene and placid, like a mirror framed with wooded
hills, looking at their faces in it. It is a beautiful
sheet of water, taking the history out of it. But
putting that in and around it, you see a picture

London to John O* Groat's.

359

before you that you will remember. Here is more
of Mary the Unfortunate. You see reflected in the
silver sheen of the lake that face which looks at you
with its soft appeal for sympathy in all the galleries
of Christendom. Out there, on that little islet, green
and low, stands the black castle in which they prisoned
her. There they made her trembling, indignant fingers
write herself " a queen without a crown." South-
ward there, where amateurs now fish for trout, young
Douglas rowed her ashore with muffled oars so softly
that they stirred no ripple at the bow. The keys of
the castle they threw into the lake to bar pursuit
lay in the mud for nearly three centuries, when they
were found by a lad of the village, and presented
to the Earl of Morton, a representative of the Douglas
family.

, The next day I walked on to Perth, passing through
a very interesting section, which nature and history
have enriched with landscapes and manscapes manifold.
It is truly a romantic region for both these qualities,
with delightful views in sudden and frequent alterna-
tion. Gflens deep, winding and dark, with steep
mountain walls folding their tree-hands over the road ;
lofty hills in full Scotch uniform, in tartan heather and
yellow grain plaided in various figures ; chippering
streams, now hidden, now coming to the light, in white

360 A Walk from

flashing foam in a rocky glade of the dell ; straths or
savannas, like great prairie gardens, threaded by mean-
dering rivers and studded with wheat in sheaves, shocks
and ricks, seen over long reaches of unreapt harvests ;
villages, hamlets, white cottages nestling in the niches
and green gorges of the mountains, and all these
sceneries set in romantic histories dating back to the
Danes and their doings in Scotland, make up a prevista
for the eye and a revista for the mind that keep both in
exhilarating occupation every rod of the distance from
Kinross to Perth.

The road via Grlenfarg would be a luxury of the
first enjoyment to any tourist with an eye to the wild,
romantic and picturesque. Debouching from this long,
winding, tree-arched dell, you come out upon Strathearn,
or the bottom-land of the river Earn, which joins the
Tay a few miles below. The term strath is peculiarly
a Scottish designation which many American readers
may not have fully comprehended, although it is so
blended with the history and romance of this country.
It is not a valley proper as we use that term, as the
Valley of the Mississippi or the Valley of the Connecti-
cut. If the word were admissible, it might be called
most descriptively the land-bay of a river, at a certain
distance between its source and mouth, such for
instance as the Grerman Flats on the Mohawk or the

London to John O 1 Groat's. 361

Oxbow on the Connecticut, at "Wetliersfield, in Vermont,
or the great onion-growing Hat on the same river
at Wethersfield in Connecticut. These straths are
numerous in Scotland, and constitute the great pro-
ductive centres of the mountain sections. They are
generally cultivated to the highest perfection of agricul-
tural science and economy and are devoted mostly to
grain. As they are always walled in by bald-headed
mountains and lofty hills, cropped as high as man and
horse can climb with a plough and planted with firs
and larches beyond, they show beautifully to the eye,
and constitute, with these surroundings, the peculiar
charm of Scotch scenery. The term is always prefixed
to the name of the river, as Strathearn, Strathspey, &c.
I noticed on this day's walk the same singular habit
that struck me in the north part of Yorkshire ; that is,
of cutting inward upon the standing grain. Several
persons, frequently women and boys, follow the mowers,
and pick up the swath and bind it into sheaves, using
no rake at all in the process. So pertinaciously they
seem to adhere to this remarkable and awkward custom,
that I saw two mowers walk down a hill, a distance of
full a hundred rods, with their scythes under their arms,
in order to begin a new swath in the same way, four or
five men and women run n ing after them full tilt to
bind the grain as it i'ell ! Here \vas a loss of at least

362 A Walk from

five minutes each to half a dozen hands, amounting to
half an hour to a single man at the end of each swath
or work. Supposing the mowers made twenty in ten
hours from bottom to top of the field, here is the loss
of one whole day for one man, or one sixth of the
whole aggregate time applied to the harvesting of the
crop, given to the mere running down that hill of six
pairs of legs for no earthly purpose but to cut inward
instead of outward, as we do. The grain-ricks in
Scotland are nearly all round and quite small. Every
one of them is rounded up at the top and fitted with a
Mandarin-looking hat of straw, which sheds the rain
well. A good- sized farm-house is flanked with quite
a village of these little round stacks, looking like a
comfortable colony of large, yellow tea-caddies in the
distance.

Beached Perth a little after dark, having made a
walk of nearly twenty miles after 11 A.M. Here I
remained over the Sabbath, and greatly enjoyed both
its rest and the devotional exercises in some of the
churches of the city.

The Fair City of Perth is truly most beautifully
situated at the head of navigation on the Tay as
Stirling is on the Forth. It has no mountainous
eminence in its midst, castle-crowned, like Stirling,
from which to look off upon such a scene as the latter

London to John O'Groafs. 363

commands. But Nature has erected grand and lofty
observatories near by in the Moncrieffe and Kinnoull
Hills, from which a splendid prospect is unrolled to the
eye. There is some historical or legendary authority
for the idea that the Homans contemplated this view
from Moncrieffe Hill ; and, as the German army re-
turning homeward from France, shouted with wild
enthusiasm, at its first sight, Dcr Rhein ! Der Rhein !
so these soldiers of the Csesars shouted at the view of
the Tay and the Corse of Growrie, Ecce Tiber ! Ecce
Campus Martins ! There was more patriotism than
parity in the comparison. The Italian river is a Rhine
in history, but a mere Groose Creek within its actual
banks compared with the Tay. In history Perth has
its full share of " love and murder," rhyme and
romance, sieges, battering and burning, royals and
rebels. In the practical life of to-day, it is a pro-
gressive, thriving town, busy, intelligent, respected and
honorable. The two natural features which would
attract, perhaps, the most special attention of the tra-
veller are the two Inches, North and South, divided
by the city. This is a peculiar Scotch term which an
untravelled American will hardly understand. It has
no relation to measurement of any kind ; but signifies
what we should call a low, level green or common in or
adjoining a town. The Inches of Perth are, to my

364 A Walk from

eye, the finest in Scotland, each being about a mile
and a half in circumference, and making delightful
and healthy playgrounds and promenades for the whole
population.

On Monday, Sept. llth, I took staff and set out for
another week-stage of my walk, or from Perth to
Inverness. Crossed the Tay and proceeded northward
up the east side of that fertile river. Fertile may
sound at first a singular qualification for a broad, rapid
stream running down out of the mountains and widen-
ing into a bay or firth at its mouth. But it may be
applied in the best sense of production to the Tay ; and
not only that, but other terms known to practical agri-
culture. Up to the present moment, no river in the
world has been cultivated with more science and success.
None has been sown so thickly with seed-vitalities or
produced more valuable crops of aquatic life. Here
salmon are hatched by hand and folded and herded
with a shepherd's care. Here pisciculture, or, to use a
far better and more euphonious word, fish-farming, is
carried to the highest perfection in Great Britain. It
is a tillage that must hereafter take its place with
agriculture as a great and honored industry. If the
cold, bald-headed mountains, the wild, stony reaches of
poverty-stricken regions, moor, morass, steppe and
prairie are made the pasturage of sheep innumerable,

London to John O'Groafs. 365

the thousands of rivers in both hemispheres will not
be suffered to run to waste through another century.
The utilitarian genius of the present age will turn
them into pasturage worth more per acre than the
value of the richest land on their banks. Just think
of the pasturage of the Tay. It rents for 14,000
a year ; and those who hire it must make it produce
at least 50,000, or $240,000 annually. Let us assume
that the whole length of this salmon-pasturage is fifty
miles, and its average width one-eighth of a mile. Then
the whole distance would contain the space of 4,000
square acres, and the annual rent for fishing would
amount to over 3 13s. per acre. This would make
every fish-bearing acre of the river worth 100, calcu-
lated on the land basis of interest or rent.

Having heard of the Stormontfields' Ponds for
Breeding Salmon, I had a great desire to see them.
They are situated on the Tay, a few miles above Perth,
and are well worthy of the inspection and admiration
of the scientific as well as the utilitarian world. The
process is as simple as it is successful and valuable.
A .race or canal, filled with a clear mountain stream,
and constructed many years ago to supply motive
power to a corn-mill, runs parallel with the river, at
the distance from it of about twenty rods. At right
angles with this stream, there are twenty-five wooden

366 A Walk from

boxes side by side, about fifty feet in length, placed
on a slight decline. These boxes or troughs, each
about two feet wide and one foot deep, are divided
into partitions by cross- boards, which do not reach,
within a few inches, the top of the siding, so that
the water shall make a continuous surface the whole
length of the trough. Each trough is filled with
round, river stones or pebbles washed clean, on which
the spawn is laid. The water is let out of the mill-
race upon these troughs through a wire-cloth filter,
covering them about two inches deep above the stones.
At the bottom, a lateral channel or race, running at
right angles to the troughs, conducts the waste water
in a rapid, bubbling stream down into the feeding
pond, which covers the space of about one-fifth of an
acre, close to the river, with which it is connected
by a narrow race gated also with a wire-cloth, to pre-
vent the little living mites from being carried off
before their time.

This may serve to give the reader some approximate
idea of the construction of the fish-fold. The next
process is the stocking it with the breeding ewes of the
sea and river. The female salmon is caught in the
spawning season with a net, and the ova are expressed
from her by passing the hand gently down the bod} r ,
when she is again put into the river to go on her way.

London to John O 1 Groat's. 367.

The manager told me that they generally reckoned
upon a thousand eggs to a pound of the salmon caught.
Thus fourteen good-sized fish would stock the twenty-
five troughs. When hatched, the little things run
down into the race-way which carries them into the
feeding pond. Here they are fed twice daily, with five
pounds of beef's liver pulverised. They remain in this
water-yard from April to autumn, when the gate is
raised and they are let out into the river. And it is a
very singular and interesting fact that those only go
which have got their sea-coats on them, or have reached
the " smolt " character. The smaller fry remain in
the pond until, as it has been said in higher circles of
society, their beards are grown, or, in their case, until
their scales are grown, to fit them for the rough and
tumble of salt-water life.

The growth of the little bull-headed mites after
being turned into the river-pasture is wonderful more
rapid than that of lambs of the Southdown breed. The
keeper had marked some of them, on letting them out,
by clipping the dorsal fin. On being caught six or eight
months afterward, they weighed from five to seven pounds
against half a pound each when sent forth to take care
of themselves. The proprietors of the fisheries defray
the expense of this breeding establishment, being taxed
only two-pence in the pound of their rental. This, of

368 A Walk from

course, they get back with large interest and profit
from the tenant-farmers of the river. As a proof of the
enhanced production of the Tay fisheries under this
cultivation the fact will suffice, that they now rent for
14,000 a year against 11,000 under the old system.

Salmon-breeding is doubtless destined to rank with
sheep-culture and cattle-culture in the future. The
remotest colonies of Great Britain are moving in the
matter with vigor and almost enthusiasm. Vessels
have been constructed on purpose to convey this fair
and mottled stock of British rivers to those of Australia
and New Zealand. In France, fish-farming has become
a large and lucrative occupation. I hope our own
countrymen, who plume themselves on going a-head in
utilitarian enterprises, will show the world what they
can do in this. Surely our New England men, who
claim to lead in American industries and ingenuities,
will not suffer half a million acres of river-pasturage to
run to waste for another half century, when it would fold
and feed millions of salmon. Once they herded in the
Connecticut in such multitudes that a special stipula-
tion was inserted in the indentures of apprentices in the
vicinity of the river that they should not be obliged to eat
salmon more than a certain number of times in a week.
Now, if a salmon is caught between the mouth and
source of the river, it is blazoned forth in the news-

London to John OGroafs. 369

papers as a very extraordinary and unnatural event.
There is no earthly reason why the Connecticut should
not breed and supply as great a number of these excellent
and beautiful fish as the Tay. Its waters are equally
pure and quiet as those of the Scotch river. Every
acre of the Connecticut, from the northernmost bridge
that spans it in Vermont to its debouchment at Say-
brook, might be made productive of as great a value
as any onion-garden acre at Wethersfield.

The salmon-shepherd of Storniontfields having fully
explained the labors and duties of his charge, rowed
me across the Tay, and I continued my walk highly
gratified in having seen one of the new industries
which this age is adding to the different cultures pro-
vided for the sustentation and comfort of human life.
The whole way to Dunkeld was full of interest, nature
and history making every mile a scene to delight the
eye and exhilarate the mind. The first considerable
village I passed through was Stanley, which gives
the name to that old family of British peers known
in history by the battle-cry of a badly-pressed sove-
reign, " On, Stanley, on ! " Murthley Castle, the seat
of Sir William Stewart, and the beautiful grounds
which front and surround it, will excite the admira-
tion of the traveller and pay him well for a moment's
pause to peruse its illuminated pages opened to his
2 B

370 A Walk from

view. The baronet is regarded as an eccentric man,
perhaps chiefly because he has built a splendid Roman
Catholic chapel quite near to his mansion and supports
a priest of that order mostly for his own spiritual good.
Near Dunkeld, Birnam Hill lifts its round, dark, bushy
head to the height of over 1,500 feet, grand and grim,
as if it wore the bonnet of Macbeth and hid his dagger
beneath its tartan cloak of firs. "Birnam Wood,"
which Shakespeare's genius has made one of the im-
mortals among earthly localities, was the setting of
that hill in his day, and perhaps centuries before it.
Crossing the Tay by a magnificent bridge, you are
in the famous old city and capital of ancient Caledonia,
Dunkeld. Here centre some of the richest rivulets
of Scotch history, ecclesiastical and military, of church
and state, cowl and crown. Walled in here, on the
upper waters of the Tay, by dark and heavily-wooded
mountains, it was just the place for the earliest monks
to select as the site of one of their cloistered commu-
nities. The two best saints ever produced by these
islands, St. Columba and St. Cuthbert, are said to
have been connected with the religious foundations of
this little sequestered city. The old cathedral, having
been knocked about like other Roman Catholic edifices
in the sledge-hammer crusades of the Reformation, was
ruined very picturesquely, as a tourist, with one of

London to John C? Croat's. 371

Murray's red book guides in his baud, would be likely
to say. But tbe choir was rebuilt and fitted up for
worship by the late Duke of Atholl at the expense
of about 5,000.

Of this duke I must say a few words, for he has left
the greenest monument to his memory that a man ever
left over his grave. He did something more and better
than roofing the choir of a ruined cathedral. He roofed
a hundred hills and valleys with a larch-and-fir-work
that will make them as glorious and beautiful as Lebanon
forever. One of the most illustrious and eloquent of
the Iroquois aristocracy was a chief called Corn-planter.
This Duke of Atholl should be named and known for
evermore as the great Tree-planter of Christendom.
We have already dwelt upon the benefaction that such
a man leaves to coming generations. This Scotch
nobleman virtually founded a new order of knighthood
far more useful and honorable than the Order of the
Grarter. To talk of garters f why, he not only put
the cold, ragged, shivering hills of Scotland into garters,
but into stockings waist high, and doublets and bonnets
and shoes of beautifully green and thick fir-plaid. He
planted 11,000 square acres with the larch alone ; and
thousands of these acres stood up edgewise against
mountains and hills so steep that the planters must
have spaded the holes with ropes around their waists
2 B 2

372 A V/alk from

to keep them from falling down the precipice. It is
stated that he had twenty-seven millions of the larch
alone planted on his mountainous estates, besides seve-
ral millions of other trees. Now, it is doubtful if the
whole region thus dibbled with this tree-crop yielded
an average rental of one English shilling per acre as a
pasturage for sheep. On passing through miles and
miles of this magnificent wood-grain and taking an
estimate of its value, I put it at 10s., or $2 40c. per tree.
Of the twenty-seven millions of larches thus planted,
ten must be worth that sum ; making alone, without
counting the rest, 5,000,000, or $24,000,000. It is
quite probable that the larches, firs and other trees now
covering the Atholl estates would sell for 10,000,000
if brought to the hammer. But he was not only the
greatest arboriculturist in the world, but the founder of
tree-farming as a productive industry as well as a deco-
rative art. Already it has transformed the Highlands
of Scotland and trebled their value as well as clothed
them with a new and beautiful scenery. What we call
the Scotch larch was not originally a native of that
country. Close to the cathedral in Dunkeld stand the
two patriarchs of the family first introduced into Scot-
land from Switzerland in 1737.

Having remained the best part of two days in Dun-
keld, I held on northward through heavily-shaded and

London to John (J Groat's. 373

winding glen and valley to Blair Atholl. For the
whole distance of twenty miles the country is quite
Alpine, wild and grand, with mountains larched or firred
to the utmost reach and tenure of soil for roots ; deep,
dark gorges pouring down into the narrowing river
their foamy, dashing streams ; mansions planted here
and there on sloping lawns showing sunnily through
groves and parks ; now a hamlet of cottages set in the
side of a lofty hill, now a larger village opening sud-
denly upon you at the turning of the turnpike road.
I reached Blair Atholl at about dark, and lodged at
the largest hotel I slept in between London and John
O'Groat's. It is virtually the tourist's inn ; for this is
the centre of some of the most interesting and striking
sceneries and localities in Scotland. Grlens, waterfalls,
stream, torrent, mountain and valley, with their roman-
tic histories, make this a very attractive region to thou-
sands of summer travellers from England and other
countries. The railway from Perth to Inverness via
Dunkeld and Blair Atholl has just opened up this
secluded Scotch Switzerland to multitudes who never
would have seen it without the help of the iron horse.
A month previous, this point had been the most distant
in Scotland from steam-routes of transportation and
travel. Now southern sportsmen were hiring up " the
shootings " for many miles on both sides of the line,

374 A Walk Jrom

making the hills and glens echo with their fusilades.
Blair Castle, the duke's mansion, is a very ordinary
building in appearance, looking from the public road
like a large four-story factory painted white, with
small, old-fashioned windows. He himself was lying
in a very painful and precarious condition, with a cancer
in the throat, from which it was the general impression
that he never would recover. The day preceding, the
Queen had visited him, while en route for Balmoral,
having gone sixty miles out of her way to comfort him
with such an expression of her sympathy.

The next day I reached the northern boundary of the
Duke of Atholl's estate, having walked for full forty
miles almost continuously through it. Passed over a very
bleak, treeless, barren waste of mountain and moorland,
most of it too rocky or soilless for even heather. The
dashing, flashing little Garry, which I had followed for
a day or two, thinned and narrowed down to a noisy
brook as I ascended towards its source. For a long
distance the country was exceedingly wild and desolate.
Terrible must be the condition of a man benighted there-
in, especially in winter. There were standing beacons
all along the road for miles to indicate the track when
it was buried in drifting snows. These were painted
posts, about six or eight feet high, planted on the rocky,
river side of the road, at a few rods interval, to guide

London to John O' Groat's. 375

the traveller and keep him from dashing over the
concealed precipices. About the middle of the after-
noon I reached the summit of the two water-sheds,
where a horse's hoof might so dam a balancing stream
as to send it southward into the Tay or northward into
the Moray Firth. Soon a rivulet welled out in the
latter direction with a decided current. It was the
Spey. A few miles brought me suddenly into a little,
glorious world of beauty. The change of theatrical
sceneries could hardly have produced a more sudden and
striking contrast than this presented to the wild, cold,
dark waste through which I had been travelling for
a day. It was Strathspey ; and I doubt if there is
another view in Scotland, of the same dimensions, to
equal it. It was indescribably grand and beautiful,
if you could blend the meaning of these two commonly-
coupled adjectives into one qualification, as you can
blend two colors on the easel. To get the full enjoyment
of the scene at one draught, you should enter it first
from the south, after having travelled for twenty miles
without seeing a sheaf of wheat or patch of vegetation
tilled by the hand of man. I know nothing in America
to compare it with or to help the American reader
to an approximate idea of it. Imagine a land-lake,
apparently shut in completely by a circular wall of
mountains of every stature, the tallest looking over

376 A Walk from

the shoulders of the lower hills, like grand giants
standing in steel helmets and green doublets and
gilded corslets, to see the soft and quiet beauty of
the valley sleeping under their watch and ward. As
the sun-bursts from the strath-skies above darted out
of their shifting cloud-walls and flashed a flush of
light upon the solemn brows of these majestic apostles
of nature one by one, they stood haloed, like the
favored saints in Scripture in the overflow of the
Transfiguration. It was just the kind of day to make
the scene glorious indescribably. The clouds and sky
were in the happiest disposition for the brilliant plays
and pictures of light and shade, and dissolving views
of fascinating splendor succeeded and surpassed each
other at a minute's interval. Now the great land-
lake, on whose bosom floated in the sunlight a thousand
islands oat-and-barley-gilded, and rimmed with the
green and purple verdure of the turnip and ruta-baga,
was all set a-glow by a luminous flood from the opening
clouds above. The next moment they closed this dis-
parted seam in their drapery, and opened a side one
upon the still, grave faces of the surrounding moun-
tains ; and, for a few minutes, the smile went round
from one to the other, and the great centurions of
the hills looked happy and almost human in the gleam.
Then shade's turn came in the play, and it played

London to John O 'Groat's. 377

its part as perfectly as light. It put in the touch
of the old Italian masters, giving an ever-changing
background to all the sublime pictures of the panorama.
I was not alone in the enjoyment of this scenery.
For the first time in this Walk I had a companion
for a day. A clergyman from near Edinburgh joined
me at Kingussie, with whom I shared the luxury
of one of the most splendid views to be found in Scot-
land. Indeed, few minds are so constituted as to
prefer to see such natural gloryscapes alone. After
a day's walk among these sceneries, we came to the
small village of Aviemore in the dusk of the evening.
Here we found that the only inn had been closed
and turned into a private residence, and that it was
doubtful if a bed could be had for love or money
in the place. The railway through it to Inverness had
just been opened, and the navvies seemed still to con-
stitute the largest portion of the population. Neither
of us had eaten any dinner, and we were hungry as
well as tired. Seeing a little, low cottage near the
railroad, with the sign of something for the public
good over the door, we went to it, and found that
it had two rooms, one a kind of rough, stone-floored
shed, the other an apartment full ten feet square,
with two beds in it, which occupied half the entire
space. But small as it was, the good man and woman

378 A Walk from

made the most of it in the way of entertainment,
getting up a tea occasionally for persons stopping
over in the village at a meal -time, also selling small
articles of grocery to the laborers. Every thing was
brought from a distance, even their bread, bacon and
butter. Their stock of these fundamentals was ex-
hausted, so that they could not give us anything
with our tea until the arrival of the train from the
north, which we all watched with common interest.
In the course of half an hour it came, and soon our
cabin-landlord brought in a large basket full of the
simplest necessaries of life, which we were quite pre-
pared to enjoy as its best luxuries. Soon a wood
fire blazed for us in the double-bedded parlor, and the
unpainted deal table was spread in the fire-light with
a repast we relished with a pleasant appreciation.

My companion was bound northward by the next
train in that direction, and was sure to find good
quarters for the night ; but as there was not an inn
for ten miles on the route I was to travel, and as it
was now quite night and the road mostly houseless and
lonely, I felt some anxiety about my own lodging.
But on inquiry I was very glad to find that one of
the two beds in the room was unoccupied and at
my disposal. So, having accompanied my fellow-
traveller to the station and seen him off with mutual

London to John O Groat's. 379

good wishes, I returned to the cottage, and the mistress
replenished the fire with a new supply of chips and
faggots, and I had two or three hours of rare enjoy-
ment, enhanced by some interesting books I found on
a shelf by the window. And this is a fact worthy of
note and full of good meaning. You will seldom find
a cottage in Scotland, however poor and small, without
a shelf of books in it. I retired rather earlier than
iisual ; but before I fell asleep, the two regular lodgers,
who occupied the other bed, came in softly, and spoke
in a suppressed tone, as if reluctant to awaken me.
And here I was much impressed with another fact
affiliated with the one I have mentioned that of
praying as well as reading in the Scotch cottage.
After a little conversation just above a whisper, the
elder of the two and he not twenty, while the other
was apparently only sixteen first read, with full Scotch
accent, one of the hard-rhymed psalms used in the
Scotch service. Then, after a short pause, he read with
a low, solemn voice a chapter in the Bible. A few
minutes of silence succeeded, as if a wordless prayer
was going upward upon the still wings of thought,
which made no audible beating in their flight. It was
very impressive ; an incident that I shall ever hold
among the most interesting of all I met with on my
walk. They were not brothers evidently, but most

380 A Walk from

likely strangers thrown together on the railroad. They
doubtless came from different directions, but, from
Highlands or Lowlands, they came out of Bible-
lighted homes, whose " voices of the night " were
blended with the breathings of religious life and
instruction. Separated from such homes, they had
agreed to make this one after the same spiritual
pattern, barring the parental presence and teaching.

The next day after breakfast, took leave of my
kind, cottage hosts, exchanging good wishes for mutual
happiness. Went out of the amphitheatre of Strath-
spey by a gateway into another surrounded by
mountains less lofty and entirely covered with heather.
For several miles beyond Carr Bridge I passed over
the wildest moorland. The road was marked by posts
about ten feet high, painted white within two feet of the
top and black above. These are planted about fifteen
rods apart, to guide the traveller in the drifting and
blinding snows of winter. The road over this cold,
desolate waste exceeded anything I ever saw in
America, even in the most fashionable suburbs of New
York and Boston. It was as smooth and hard as a
cement floor. Here on this treeless wild I met several
men at work trimming the edges of the road by a line,
with as much precision and care as if they were laying
out an aisle in a flower-garden. After a walk of about

London to John O* Groat's. 381

seventeen miles I reached Freeburn Inn about the
middle of the afternoon, and as it began to rain and to
threaten bad weather for walking, I concluded to stop
there for the night, and found good quarters.

The rain continued in showers, and I feared I should
be unable to reach Inverness to spend the sabbath.
There was a cattle fair at the inn, and a considerable
number of farmers and dealers came together notwith-
standing the weather. Indeed, there were nearly as
many men and boys as animals on the ground. A score
or more had come in each leading or driving a single
cow or calf. The cattle generally were evidently of
the Graelic origin and antecedents little, chubby,
scraggy creatures, of all colors, but mostly black, with
wide-branching horns longer than their fore-legs.
Their hair is long and as coarse as a polar seal's,
and they look as if they knew no more of housing
against snow, rain and wintry winds, or of a littered
bed, than the buffaloes beyond the upper waters of the
Missouri. One would be inclined to think they had
lived from calf hood on nothing but heather or gorse,
and that the prickly fodder had penetrated through
their hides and covered them with a growth midway
between hair and bristles. They will not average
over 350 Ibs. when dressed ; still they seem to hold
their own among other breeds which have attracted

382 A Walk from

so much attention. This is probably because they can
browse out a living where the Durham and Devon
would starve.

The sheep in this region are chiefly the old Scotch
breed, with curling horns and crocked faces and legs, such
as are represented in old pictures. The black seems to
be spattered upon them, and looks as if the heather would
rub it off. The wool is long and coarse, giving them a
goat-like appearance. They seem to predominate over
any other breed in this part of Scotland, yet not neces-
sarily nor advantageously. A large sheep farmer from
England was staying at the inn, with whom I had much
conversation on the subject. He said the Cheviots were
equally adapted to the Highlands, and thought they
would ultimately supplant the black faces. Although
he lived in Northumberland, full two hundred miles to
the south, he had rented a large sheep-walk, or moun-
tain-farm, in the Western Highlands, and had come
to this section to buy or hire another tract. He kept
about 4,000 sheep, and intended to introduce the
Cheviots upon these Scotch holdings, as their bodies
were much heavier and their wool worth nearly double
that of the old black-faced breed. Sheep are the prin-
cipal source of wealth in the whole of the North and
West of Scotland. I was told that sometimes a flock
of 20,000 is owned by one man. The lands on which

London to John O'Groafs. 383

they are pastured will not rent above one or two Eng-
lish shillings per acre ; and a flock even of 1,000 requires
a vast range, as may be indicated by the reply of a
Scotch farmer to an English one, on being asked by
the latter, " How many sheep do you allow to the
acre?" "Ah, mon," was the answer, "that's nae
the way we count in the Highlands ; it's how monie
acres to the sheep."

At about two p.m., the showers becoming less fre-
quent, I set out with the hope of reaching Inverness
before night. The wind was high, the road muddy,
or dirty, as the English call that condition ; and the
rain frequently compelled me to seek shelter in some
wayside cottage, or under the fir-trees that were
planted in groves on each side at narrow intervals.
The walking was heavy and slow in face of the fre-
quent showers and a strong gale from the north-east,
so that I was exceedingly glad to reach an inn within
four miles of Inverness, where I promised myself
comfortable lodgings for the night. It was a rather
large, but comfortless-looking house, evidently con-
centrating all its entertainment for travellers in the
tap-room. After considerable hesitation, the landlady
consented to give me bed and board ; and directed
" the lassie " to make a fire for me in a large and very
respectable room on the second floor. I soon began

384 A Walk from

to feel quite at home by its side. My boots had leaked
on the way and my feet were very wet and cold ; and
it was with a pleasant sense of comfort that I changed
stockings, and warmed myself at the ruddy grate, while
the storm seemed to increase without. After waiting
about an hour for tea, I heard the lassie's heavy footstep
on the stairs ; a knock the door opens now for the
tray and the steaming tea-pot, and happy vision of
bread, oatcake and Scotch scons ! Alas ! what a
falling-off was there from this delicious expectation ! (
The lassie had brought a severe and peremptory
message from the master, who had just returned home.
And she delivered it commiseratingly but decidedly.
She was to tell me from him that there was nothing
in the house to set before me ; that the fair the day
before had eaten out the whole stock of his provisions ;
in short, that I was to take my staff and walk on to
Inverness. It was in vain that I remonstrated, pleaded
and urged wet feet, the darkness, the wind and rain.
"It is so," said the lassie, "and can't be otherwise."
She tried to encourage me to the journey by shortening
the distance by half its actual miles, saying it was only
two, when it was full four, and they of the longest kind.
So I went out into the night in my wet clothes, and
put the best face and foot to the head-wind and rain
that I could bring to bear against them. Both were

London to John C? Groat's.

385

strong, beating and drenching ; and it was so dark
that I could hardly see the road. In the course of
half an hour, I made the lassie's two miles, and in
another, the whole of the actual distance, and found
comfortable quarters in one of the temperance inns
of Inverness, reaching it between nine and ten at
night. Here I spent a quiet sabbath, which I greatly
enjoyed.

2 c

386 A Walk from

CHAPTEE XVIII.

INVERNESS ; ROSS-SHIRE ; TAIN ; DORNOCH ; GOLSPIE PROGRESS OF RAIL-
ROADS THE SUTHERLAND EVICTION SEA-COAST SCENERY CAITH-
NESSWICK : HERRING FISHERIES JOHN O'GROAT'S : WALK'S END.

INYEENESS is an interesting, good-sized town, with
an intellectual and pleasing countenance, of some-
what aristocratic and self-complacent expression. It is
considered the capital of the Highlands and wears a
decidedly metropolitan air. It is well situated on the
Ness, just at its debouchment into the Moray Firth, a
river that runs with a Ehine-like current through the
town and is spanned with a grand suspension bridge.
It has streets of city-built and city-bred buildings,
showing wealth and elegance. Several edifices are in
process of erection that will rank with some of the best
in Edinburgh and Glasgow. It has a long and pre-
tentious history, reaching back to the Eomans, and
dashed with the romance of the wild ages of the coun-
try. Oliver Cromwell, or Sledgehammer II,. Macbeth 9
Thane of Cawdor, Queen Mary, Prince Charlie, and

London to John Cf Groat's. 387

other historical celebrities, entered their names and
doings on the records of this goodly town.

On Monday, September 21st, I set out with a good
deal of animation on the last week-stage of my journey,
which I was anxious to accomplish as soon as possible,
as the weather was becoming unsettled with frequent
rain. Beached Invergordon, passing through a most
interesting section of country, full of very fertile straths.
It was the part of Ross-shire lying on the Moray and
Beauly Firths and divided by rivers dashing down
through the wooded gorges of the mountains. I saw
here some of the most productive land in Scotland.
Hundreds of acres were studded with wheat and barley
stooks, and about an equal space was covered with
standing grain, though so near the month of October.
Plantations, parks, gentlemens' seats, glens deep and
grand, fir-clad mountains, villages, hamlets and scat-
tered cottages made up the features of every changing
view. Indeed, one travelling for a week between Perth
and Inverness comes upon such a region as this with
pleasant surprise, as upon an exotic section, imported
from another latitude.

The next day I held on northward, though the

weather was very unfavorable and the walking heavy

and fatiguing. Passed what seemed the bold and ridgy

island of Cromarty, so associated with the venerated

2 c2

388 A Walk from

memory of Hugh Miller. The beating rain drove
me frequently to the wayside cottages for shelter ;
and in every one of them I was received with kind
words and pleasant looks. One of these was occupied
by an old woman in the regular Scotch cap a vener-
able old saint, with her Bible and psalm-book library
on her window-sill, and her peat fire burning cheerily.
When on leaving I intimated that I was from America,
she followed me out into the road, asking me a hundred
questions about the country and its condition. She
had three sons in Montreal, and felt a mother's interest
in the very name America. The cottage was one
of a long street of them by the sea-side, and I supposed
it was a fishing village ; but I learned from her that the
people were mostly the evicted tenants of the Duke
of Sutherland, who were turned out of his county some
thirty years ago to make room for sheep. I made
only eleven miles this day on account of the rain, and
was glad to find cheery and comfortable quarters in an
excellent inn kept by a widow and her three daughters
in Tain. Nothing could exceed their kindness and
attention, which evidently flowed more from a dis-
position than from a professional habit of making
their guests at home for a pecuniary or business con-
sideration. I reached their house about the middle
of the afternoon, cold and wet, after several hours'

London to John O' Groat's. 389

walk in the rain, and was received as one of the family ;
the eldest daughter, who had all the grace and intelli-
gence of a cultivated lady, helping me off with my wet
overcoat, and even offering to pull off my water-soaked
boots an office no American could accept, and which I
gently declined, taking the will for the deed. A large
number of Scotch navvies were at the inns of the town,
making an obstreperous auroval in celebration of the
monthly pay-day. They had received the day pre-
ceding a month's wages, and they were now drinking
up their money with the most reckless hilarity ; swal-
lowing the pay of five long hours at the pick in a
couple of gills of whiskey. How strange that men
can work in rain, cold and heat at the shovel for a
whole day, then drink up the whole in two hours
at the gin-shop ! These pickmen pioneers of the
Iron Horse, with their worst habits, are yet a kind
of John-the-Baptists to the march and mission of
civilization, preparing its way in the wilderness, and
bringing secluded and isolated populations to its light
and intercourse. It is wonderful how they are working
their way northward among these bald and thick-set
mountains. When I first visited Scotland, in 1846,
the only piece of railroad north of the Forth was
that between Dundee and Arbroath, hardly an hour
long. Now the iron pathways are running in every

39O A Walk from

direction, making grand junctions at points which had
never felt the navvy's pick a dozen years ago. Here
is one heading towards John O'Groat's, grubbing its
way like a mole around the firths, cutting spiral gains
into the rock-ribbed hills, bridging the deep and dark
gorges, and holding on steadily north-poleward with
a brave faith and faculty of patience that moves
mountains, or as much of them as blocks its course.
The progress is slow, silent, but sure. The world, busy
in other doings, does not hear the pick, nor the speech
of the powder when it speaks to a huge rock a-straddle
the path. The world, even including the shareholders,
hears but little, if anything, of the progress of the work
for months, perhaps for a year. Then the consumma-
tion is announced in the form of an invitation to the
public to " assist " at the opening of a railroad through
towns and villages that never saw the daylight the
locomotive brings in its wake. So it will be here.
Some day, in the present decade, there will be an
excursion train advertised to run from London to
John O'Grroat's; and perhaps the lineal descendants
of Sigurd, or some other old Norse jarl, will wear
the conductor's belt and cap or drive the engine.

The weather was still unsettled, with much wind
and rain. Resumed my walk, and at about four
miles from Tain, crossed the Dornoch Firth in a sail

London to John O* Groat's. 391

ferry boat, and at noon reached Dornoch, the capital
of Sutherlandshire. This was one of the fourteen
cities of Scotland; and its little, chubby cathedral,
and the tower of the old bishop's palace still give
it a kind of Canterbury air. The Earls of Sutherland
for many generations lie interred within the walls
of this ancient church. After stopping here for an
hour or two for dinner, I continued on to Golspie,
the residence of the mighty lord of the manor, or
the owner, master and human disposer of this great
mountain county of Scotland. It is stated that full
four-fifths of it belong to him who now holds the
title, and that his other great estates, added to this
teritory, make him the largest landowner in Great
Britain and probably in Europe. Just before reaching
Grolspie, a lofty, sombre mountain, with its bald head
enveloped in the mist, and which I had been two hours
apparently in passing, cleared away and revealed its
full stature and more. Towering up from its top-
most summit, a tall column lifted a human figure in
bronze skyward cloud-high and frequently higher still.
I believe the brazen face that thus looks into the pure
and holy skies without blushing is a duplicate of the one
worn in human flesh by His Grace, E victor I., who un-
peopled his great county of many thousands of human
inhabitants, and made nearly its whole area of 18,000

392 A Walk from

square miles a sheep-walk. But I will not break the
seal of that history. It was full of bitter experience
to multitudes. Not for the time being was it joyous,
but grievous exceedingly surpassing endurance to
many. But it is all over now. The ship-loads of
evicted men and women who looked their last upon
Scotland while its mountains and glens were reddened
with the flames of their burning cottages, carried away
with them a bitter feeling in their hearts which years
of better experience did not soften. Not for their good
was it meant in the motive of the transaction ; but
for their good it worked most blessedly. It was a
rough transplanting, and the tenderest fibres of human
affection broke and bled under the uptearing ; but they
took root in the Western World, and grew luxuriantly
under the light and dew of a happier destiny. It
was hard for fathers and mothers who were taking
on the frost-work of age upon their brows; but for
their children it was the birth of a new life; for
them it was the introduction to a future which had
a sun in it, rayful and radiant with the beams of
hope and promise. Let those who denounce and
deplore this harsh unpeopling come and stand upon
the cold, bleak summit of one of these Sutherland
mountains. Let them bring their compasses, or some
instrument for measuring the angles, sines and cosines

London to John O Groat's. 393

of human conditions. Plant your theodolite here ;
wipe the telescope's eye -with your handkerchief; look
your keenest in the line of the lineage of these evicted
thousands. Steady, now ! while the most tranquil light
of the future is on the pathway of your eye. This
first reach of your vision is the life-track of the fathers
and mothers unhoused among these mountains. Look
on beyond, over the longer life-line of their children;
then farther still under the horizon of the remotest
future to the track of their children's children. Can
you make an anglo of a single degree's subtension in
the hereditary conditions of these generations, or a
dozen beyond ? Can you detect a point of departure
by which the second generation would have diverged
from the first, or the third from the second, and have
attained to a higher life of comfort, intelligence, social
and political position had they remained in these
mountain cottages, grubbed on their cottage farms,
and lived from hand to mouth on stinted rations of
oatmeal and potatoes, as their ancestors had done from
time immemorial ? Can you see, among all the hopeful
possibilities of Time's to-morrows, any such change for
the better ? You can sight no such prospect with your
telescope in that direction. Turn it around and sweep
the horizon of that other condition into which they
were thrust, weeping and wrathful, against their will.

394 <d Walk from

Follow them across the Atlantic to North America, to
their homes in the States and in the Canadas. Measure
the angle they made in this transposition, and the lati-
tude and longitude of social and moral life they have
reached from this Sutherland point of departure. The
sons of the fathers and mothers who had their family
nests stirred up so cruelly, and scattered, like those
of rooks, from their holdings in the cliffs, gorges and
glens of these cold mountains, are now among the
most substantial and respected men of the Western
World. Some of them to-day are mayors of towns
of larger population than the whole county of Suther-
land. Some, doubtless, are members of Congress,
representing each a constituency of one hundred thou-
sand persons, and a vast amount of intelligence, wealth
and industry. They are merchants, manufacturers,
farmers, teachers and preachers, filling all the pro-
fessions and occupations of the continent. Is not that
an angle of promise to your telescope ? Is not that
a line of divergence which has conducted these evicted
populations, at a small distance from this point of
departure, into the better latitudes of human expe-
rience ? The selling of this Scotch Joseph to America
was more purely and simply a pecuniary transaction
than that recorded in Scripture ; for in that the unkind
and jealous brothers sold the innocent boy for envy,

London to John O 1 Groat's. 395

not for the love of pelf, though the Ishmaelites bought
him on speculation. But not for envy was the Suther-
land lad sold and shipped to a foreign land, but rather
for a contemptuous estimate of his money value. The
proprietor-patriarch of the county took to a more quiet
and profitable favorite the sheep, and sent it to
feed on a pasture enriched with the ashes of Joseph's
cottage. It is to be feared he meant only money ;
but Providence meant a blessing beyond the measure-
ment of money to the evicted; and what Providence
meant it made for him and his posterity, and they are
now enjoying it.

Dunrobin Castle, the grand residence of the Duke of
Sutherland, looks off upon the sea at Grolspie. It is
truly a magnificent edifice, ranking with the first
palaces of Christendom. Nearly eight hundred years
has it been in building, though, I believe, all that
commands admiration for stature and style is the
work of the present century. Whatever the Suther-
land family may have been in local position and
history in past centuries, one of the noblest women
that ever ennobled the nobility of Great Britain, has
given the name a celebrity and an estimation in
America which all who ever wore it before never won
for it. The Duchess of Sutherland, the noble and large-
hearted sister of Lord Morpeth-Carlisle, has given to

396 A Walk from

the coronet she wore a lustre brighter to the American
eye than the light of diadems which have dazzled
millions in Europe. When the Fatherhood of God
and the Brotherhood of Men shall come to its high
place in the hearts of nations as the crown-faith of all
their creeds, what this noble woman felt, said and did
for the Slave in his bonds shall be mentioned of her
by the preachers of that great doctrine in years to
come. When the jewels of Humanity's memories shall
be made up, she who, as it were, bent down to him in
his prison-house and put her jewelled hands to the
breaking of his fetters, shall stand, with women of the
same sympathy, only next to her who broke her box
of ointment on the Saviour's feet.

The next day made a walk to Helmsdale, a distance
of about eighteen miles. The weather was favorable,
the scenery grand and varied with almost every feature
that could give it interest. The finest of roads wound
in and out around the mountain headlands, so that
alternately I was walking upon a lofty esplanade
overlooking the still expanse of the steel-blue sea,
then facing inward to the gorges of the grand and
solemn hills. Found comfortable quarters in one of
the inns of Helmsdale, a vigorous, busy, fishing village
nestling under the shadow of the mountains at the
mouth of a little river of the same name. After tea,

London to John O 1 Groat's. 397

went down to the wharf or quay and had some con-
versation with one of the masters of the business. He
cured and put up about 30,000 barrels of herrings him-
self in a season, employing, while it lasted, 500 persons.
Their chief market is the North of Europe, especially
Poland, and the business was consequently much de-
pressed on account of the troubles in that country. The
occupation of this little sea-side village illustrated the
ramifications of commerce. They imported their salt
from Liverpool, their staves from Norway and their
hoops from London.

Set out again immediately after breakfast, feeling
that I was drawing near to the end of my journey.
I was soon in the treeless county of Caithness, so
fraught with the wild romance of the Norsemen.
Passed over the bleakest district I had yet seen, called
Old Ord, a cold, rough, cloud-breeding region that the
very heavens above seem to frown upon with a scowl
of dissatisfaction. Still, the road over this dark,
mountain desert, though staked on each side to keep
the traveller from wandering in the blinding snows
of winter, was as beautifully kept as the carriage-way
in the park of Dunrobin Castle. The sending of an
English queen to conciliate the Welsh, by giving birth
to a son in one of their castles, was not a much better
stroke of policy than that of England in perforating

398 A Walk from

Scotland to the Northern Sea with this unparalleled
and splendid road, constructed at first for a military
purpose. I heard a man repeat a couplet, probably of
unwritten poetry, in popular vogue among the High-
lands, and which has quite an Irish collocation of
ideas. It is spoken thus, as far as I can recollect

Who knew these roads ere they were made
Should hless the Lord for General Wade.

I doubt if there are ten consecutive miles of carriage-
road in America that could compare for excellence
with that over the desert of Old Ord. I was overtaken
by a heavy shower before I had made the trajet, and
was glad to reach one of the most comfortable inns of
the Highlands, in the beautiful, romantic and pic-
turesque glen of Berriedale. Here, nestling between
lofty mountain ridges, which warded off the blasting
sea- winds sweeping across from Norway, were planta-
tions and groves of trees, almost the only ones I saw
in the county. Nothing could exceed the hospitality
of the family that kept the large, white-faced hotel at
the bottom of this pleasant valley ; especially after I
incidentally said that I had walked all the way from
London to see the country and people. They admitted
me into the kitchen and gave me a seat by the great
peat fire, where I had a long talk with them, beginning
with the mother. Having intimated that I was an

London to John O' Groat's. 399

American, the whole family, old and young, including
the landlord, gathered around me and had a hundred
questions to ask. They related many incidents about
the great eviction in Sutherland, which was an event
that seems to make a large stock of legendary and
unwritten stories, like the old Sagas of the Northmen.
When I had dried my clothes and eaten a comfortable
dinner before their kitchen fire and resumed my staff,
they all followed me out to the road, and then with
their wishes for a good journey as long as I was in
hearing distance. Continued my walk around head-
lands, now looking seaward, now mountainward, now
ascending on heather-bound esplanades, now descend-
ing in zig-zag directions into deep glens, over massive
and elegant bridges that spanned the mountain streams
and their steep and jagged banks. After a walk of
eighteen miles, put up at an inn a little north of the
village of Dunbeath, kept by an intelligent and indus-
trious farmer. The rain had continued most of the
day, and I was obliged to seek shelter sometimes under
a stunted tree which helped out the protecting power
of a weather-beaten umbrella ; now in the doorway of
an open stable or cow-shed, and once with my back
against the door of a wayside church, which kept off
the rain in one direction. This being a kind of border-
season between summer and autumn, there were no

400 A Walk from

fires in the inns generally except in the kitchen, and
I soon learned to make for that, and always found a
kindly welcome to its comforts ; though sometimes the
good woman and her lassie would look a little flushed
at having their "busiest culinary operations revealed so
suddenly to a stranger. Some of these kitchens are
fitted for sleeping apartments ; occasionally having two
tiers of berths like a ship's cabin, slightly and rudely
curtained.

The family of this wayside inn, seemingly like every
other family in the country, had connections in
America, embracing brothers, uncles and cousins. I
was shown a little paper casket of hair flower-work,
sent by post ! It was wrought of locks of every shade
and tint, from the snow of a grandmother over one
hundred years of age to the little, sunny curls of the
youngest child in the circle of kindred families. The
Scotch branch had collected specimens from relatives
in Great Britain and forwarded them to the family
in America, one of whose daughters had worked them
into two bouquets of flowers, sending one of them by
post to this little white cottage on the Northern Sea, as
a memento of affection. What enhanced the beauty of
this interchange was the fact, that forty-eight years had
elapsed since the landlord's brother left his native land
for New England and had never seen it since. Still,

London to John O* Groat's. 401

the cousins, who had never seen each other's faces, had
kept up an affectionate correspondence. A son and
son-in-law of the brother in America were in the
Federal army, and here was a sea-divided family filled
with all the sad, silent solicitude of affection for beloved
ones exposed to the fearful hazards of a war sundering
more ties of blood-relationship than any other ever
waged on earth.

Saturday, September 27th. Eesumed my walk with
increased animation, feeling myself within two days'
distance of its end. The scenery softens down to an
agricultural aspect, the country declining northerly
toward the sea. Passed through a well-cultivated
district, never unpeopled or wasted by eviction, but
held by a kind of even yeomanry of proprietors. The
cottages are comfortable, resembling the white houses
of New England considerably. They are nearly all
of one story, with a chimney at each end, broadside to
the road, and a door in the middle, dividing the house
into two apartments. They are built of stone, the
newest ones having a slate roof. Some of them are
whitewashed, others so liberally jointed with mortar as
to give them a bright and cheery appearance. These,
of course, are the last edition of cottages, enlarged and
amended in every way. The old issues are ragged
volumes, mostly bound in turf or bog grass, well corded
2 i)

4O2 A Walk from

down with ropes of heather, giving the roof a singular
ribby look, rounded on the ridge. In many cases a
stone is attached to each end of the rope, so as to make
it hug the thatch closely. I noticed that in a con-
siderable number of the old cottages the stone wall
only reached up a foot or two from the ground, the
rest being made up of blocks of peat. Some of the
oldest had no premonitory symptoms of a chimney,
except a hole in the roof for the smoke. These in no
way differed from the stone-and-turf cottages in
Ireland.

Again occasional showers brought me into acquain-
tance with the people living near the road. In every
case I found them kind and hospitable, giving me a
pleasant welcome and the best seat by their peat-fire.
I sat by one an hour while the rain fell cold and fast
outside. The good woman and her daughter were
busy baking barley-cakes. They were the first I had
seen, and I ate them with a peculiar zest of appetite.
Told them many stories about America in return for a
great deal of information about the customs and condi-
tion of the working-people. They generally built their
own cottages, costing from 40 to 50, not counting in
their own labor. I met on the road scores of fishermen
returning to their homes at the conclusion of the
herring season ; and was struck with their appearance

London to John O 1 Groat's. 403

in every way. They are truly a stalwart race of men,
broad-chested, of intelligent physiognomy, with Scan-
dinavian features fully developed. A half dozen of
them followed a horse-cart containing their nets all
done up in a round ball, like a bladder of snuff, with
the number of their boat marked upon it.

At about four p.m., I came in sight of the steeples
of Wick, a brave, little city by the Norse Sea, which
may not only be called the Wick but the Candle of
Northern Scotland; lighting, like a polar star, this
hyperborean shoreland of the British isle. I never
entered a town with livelier pleasure. It is virtually
the last and farthest on the mainland in this direction.
Its history is full of interest. Its great business is full
of vigor, daring and danger. Here is the great land-
home of the Vikings of the nineteenth century ; the
indomitable men who walk the roaring and crested
billows of this Northern Ocean in their black, tough
sea-boats and bring ashore the hard-earned spoils of
the deep. This is the great metropolis of Fishdom.
Eric the Red, nor any other pre-Columbus navigator
of the North American Seas, ever mustered braver
crews than these sea-boats carry to their morning beats.
Ten thousand of as hardy men as ever wrestled with
the waves, and threw them too, are out upon that
wide water-wold before the sun looks on it half of
2 n 2

404 A Walk from

them wearing the features of their Norse lineage, as
light-haired and crisp-whiskered as the sailors of
Harold the Fair-haired a thousand years ago. They
come from all the coasts of Scotland, from Orkney,
Shetland, the Hebrides and Lewes islands, and down
out of the heart of the Highlands. It is a hard and
daring industry they follow, and hundreds of graves
on the shore and thousands at the bottom of the sea
have been made with no names on them, as the long
record of the hazards they run in the perilous occu-
pation. But they keep their ranks full from year to
year, pushing out new boats marked with higher
numbers.

The harbor has been dangerous and difficult of
access, but of late a great effort has been made to
render it more safe and commodious. The Scotch
fisheries now yield from 250,000 to 300,000 barrels of
herrings annually, employing about 15,000 men ; and
Wick stands first among all the fishing ports of the
kingdom. It is a thriving town, well supplied with
churches, schools, hotels, banks and printing-offices.
Several new buildings are now being erected which
will rank high in architecture and add new features
of elegance to the place. The population is a vigorous,
intelligent, highly moral and well-read community, as
I could not fail to notice on attending service on the

London to John O 1 Groat's. 405

sabbath at different places of worship. Wick is
honored with this distinction it assembles a larger
congregation of men to listen to the glad Evangel on
Sunday than any city of the world ever musters under
one roof for the same purpose. It is the out-door church
of the fishermen. They sometimes number 5,000 adult
men, sea-beaten and sun-burnt, gathered in from
mountainous island and mainland all around the
northern coasts of Scotland.

Monday, Sept. 28th. The weather was favorable, and
I set out on my last day's walk northward with a
sense of satisfaction I could hardly describe. The
scenery was beautiful in every direction. The road
was perfect up to the last rod ; as well kept as if it
ran through a nobleman's park. The country most
of the way was well cultivated oats being the prin-
cipal crop. Here, almost within sight of the Orkneys,
I heard the clatter of the reaping machine, which,
doubtless, puts out the same utterance over and upon
the sea at Land's End. It has travelled fast and
fur since 1851, when it first made its appearance in
Europe in the Crystal Palace, as one of the wild,
impracticable " notions " of American genius. In
Wick I visited a newspaper establishment and saw
in operation one of the old " Columbians " or the
American printing-press, surmounted by the eagle of

406 A Walk from

the Republic. The sewing-machine is in all the
towns and villages on the island. If there is not an-
American clock at John O'Groat's, I hope some of my
fellow-townsmen will send one there, Bristol-built.
They are pleasant tokens of free-labor genius. No
land tilled by slaves could produce them. I saw
many large and highly-cultivated farms on these
last miles of my walk. The country was propor-
tionately divided between food and fuel. Oats and
barley constitute the grain-crops. The uncultivated
land interspersed with the yellow fields of harvest
is reserved for peat the poor man's fuel and his
wealth. For were it not for the inexhaustible
abundance of this cheap and accessible firing, he
could hardly inhabit this region. It would seem
strange to an American, who had not realised the
difference of the two climates, to see fields full of
reapers on the very threshold of October, as I saw
them on this last day's walk. I counted twelve
women and two men in one field plying the sickle,
all strongly-built and good-looking and well dressed
withal.

The sea was as still and blue as a lake. A lark
was soaring and warbling over it with as happy
and hopeful a voice as if it were singing over the
greenest acres of an English meadow. When I had

London to John O Groat's. 407

made half of the seventeen miles between Wick and
John O'Grroat's, I began to look with the liveliest
interest for the first glimpse of the Orkneys, but
projecting and ridgy headlands intercepted the pros-
pect. About three p.m., as the road emerged from
behind one of them, those famous islands burst
suddenly into view ! There they were ! in full
sight, so near that their grain-fields and white cottages
and all their distinguishing features seemed within
half a mile's distance. This was the most interesting
coup d'ceil that I ever caught in any country. Here,
then, after weeks and months of travel on foot, I
was at the end of my journey. Through all the
days of this period I had faced northward, and here
was the Ultima Thule, the goal and termination of
my tour. The road to the sea diverged from the
main turnpike, which continued around the coast to
Thurso. Followed this branch a couple of miles,
when it ended at the door of a little, quiet, one-story
inn on the very shore of the Pentland Firth. It
was a moment of the liveliest enjoyment to me.
When I left London, about the middle of July, I
was slowly recovering from a severe indisposition and
hardly expected to be able to make more than a few
miles of my projected walk. But I had gathered
strength daily, and when I brought up at this little

408 A Walk from

inn at the very jumping-off end of Scotland, I was
fresher and more vigorous on foot than at any previous
stage of the journey.

Having found to my great satisfaction that they
could ' give me a bed for the night, I went with two
gentlemen of the neighborhood to see the site of the
celebrated John O'Grroat's House, about a mile and a
half from the inn. There was only a footpath to it
across intervening fields, and when we reached it a
rather vigorous exercise of the organ of individuality
was requisite to "locate" the foundations of "the
house that Jack built." Indeed, pilgrims to the
shrine of this famous domicile are liable to much
disappointment at finding so little remaining of a
residence so historical. Literally not one stone is
left upon another. A large stone granary standing
near is said to have been built of the debri* of the
house, and this helps out one's faith when struggling
to believe in the existence of such a building at all.
A certain ridgy rising in the ground, to which you
try to give an octagonal shape, is pointed out as
indicating the foundations ; but an unsatisfactory
obscurity rests upon the whole history of the estab-
lishment. Whether true or not, that history of the
house which one would prefer to believe runs thus :

In the reign of James IV. of Scotland, three

London to John O' Groat's. 409

brothers, Malcolm, Gavin, and John de Groat, natives
of Holland, came to this coast of Caithness, with a
letter in Latin from that monarch recommending them
to the protection and countenance of his subjects
hereabout. They got possession of a large district of
land and in process of time multiplied and prospered
until they numbered eight different proprietors by the
name of Groat. On one of the annual dinners
instituted to commemorate their arrival in Caithness,
a dispute arose as to the right of precedency in taking
the door and the head of the table. This waxed very
serious and threatened to break up these annual
gatherings. But the wisdom and virtue of John
prevented this rupture. He made a touching speech
to them, soothing their angry spirits with an appeal
to the common and precious memories of their native
land and to all their joint experiences in this. He
entreated them to return to their homes quietly, and
he would remedy the current difficulty at the next
meeting. Won by his kindly spirit and words, they
complied with his request. In the interval John
built a house expressly for the purpose, of an octagonal
form, with eight doors and windows. He then placed
a table of oak, of the same shape, in the middle, and
when the next meeting took place, he desired each
head of the different Groat families to enter at his

4io A Walk from

own door and sit at the head of his own table. This
happy and ingenious plan restored good feeling and
a pleasant footing to the sensitive families and gave
to the good Dutchman's name an interest which it
will carry with it forever.

After filling my pockets with some beautiful, little
shells strewing the site of the building called "John
O'Groat's buckies," I returned to the inn. One of
the gentlemen who accompanied me was the tenant
of the farm which must have been John's homestead,
containing about two hundred acres. It was mostly
in oats, still standing, with a good promise of forty
bushels to the acre. He resided at Thurso, some
twenty miles distant, and found no difficulty in carry-
ing on the estate through a hired foreman. I never
passed a more enjoyable evening than in the little, cosy,
low-jointed parlor of this sea-side inn. Scotch cakes
never had such a relish for me nor a peat-fire more
comfortable fellowship of pleasant fancies as I sat at
the tea-table. There was a moaning of winds down
the Pentland Firth a clattering and chattering of
window shutters, as if the unrestful spirits of the old
Vikings and Norse heroes were walking up and down
the scene of their wild histories and gibbering over
their feats and fates. Spent an hour or two in writing
letters to friends in England and America to tell them

London to John O 1 Groat's. 411

of my arrival at this extreme goal of my walk, aiid a
full hour in poring over the visitors' book, in which
there were names from all countries in Christendom
and also impressions and observations in prose, poetry,
English, French, Latin, German and other languages.
Many of the comments thus recorded intimated some
dissatisfaction that John O'Groat's House was so
mythical; that so much had to be supplied by the
imagination ; that not even a stone of the foundation
remained in its place to assist fancy to erect the build-
ing into a positive fact of history. But they all bore
full and sometimes fervid testimony to the good cheer
of the inn at the hands of the landlady. There was
one record which blended loyalty to palate and
patriotism " The Roast Beef of Old England " and
" God save the Queen " rather amusingly. A party
wrote their impressions after this manner " Visited
John O'Groat's House ; found little to see ; came back
tired and hungry ; walked into a couple of tender
chickens and a good piece of bacon : God save Mrs.
Manson and all the Eoyal Family ! " This concluding
" sentiment" was doubtless sincere and honest, although
it involved a question of precedence in the rank of
two feelings which John the Dutchman could have
hardly settled by his eight-angled plan of adjustment.
The next morning, for the first time for nearly three

412 A Walk from

months of continuous travel, I facet! southward,
leaving behind me the Orkneys unvisited, though I
had a strong desire to see these celebrated islands the
theatre of so much interesting history. Twenty years
ago I translated all the "Sagas" relating to the voyages
and exploits of the Northmen in these northern seas
and islands, their explorations of the coast of North
America centuries before Columbus was born, their
doings in Iceland and on all the islands great and
small now forming the British realms. This gave
additional zest to my enjoyment in standing on the
shore of the Pentland Firth and looking over upon
the scene of old Haoo's and Sigurd's doing, daring
and dying.

Footed it back to Wick and there terminated my
walk, having measured, step by step, full seven
hundred miles since I left London, counting in the
divergences from a straight line which I had made.
In the evening I addressed a large and intelligent
audience which had been convened at short notice,
and I never stood up before one with such peculiar
satisfaction as in this North-star town of Scotland.
I had travelled nearly the whole distance incoy.,
without hearing my own name on a pair of human
lips for weeks. To lay aside this embargo and to
speak to such a large congregation, face to face, was

London to John O' Groat's. 413

like coming back again into the great communions of
humanity after a long and private fellowship with
the secluded quietudes of Nature.

At four p.m. the next day I took the Thurso coach
and passed over in the night the whole distance that
had occupied me a week in travelling by staff.
Stopped a night in Inverness, another at Elgin, and
spent the sabbath with my friend Anthony Cruick-
shank at Sittyton, about fifteen miles north of Aber-
deen.

414 A Walk from

CHAPTER XIX.

ANTHONY CRUICKSHANK THE GREATEST HERD OF SHORT-HORNS IX
THE WORLD RETURN TO LONDON AND TERMINATION OF MY TOUR.

SITTYTON designates hardly a village in Aberdeen-
shire, but it has become a point of great interest to
the agricultural world a second Babraham. In this
quiet, rural district, Anthony Cruickshank, a quiet,
modest, meek- voiced member of the Society of Friends,
" generally called Quakers," has made a history and a
great enterprise of vast value to the world. He is one
of those four-handed but one-minded men who, with a
pair to each, build up simultaneously two great busi-
nesses so symmetrically that you would think they gave
their whole intellect, will and genius to one. Anthony
Cruickshank, the Quaker of Sittyton, has made but little
more noise in the world than Nature makes in building
up some of her great and beautiful structures. His
footsteps were so light and gentle that few knew that
he was running at all, until they saw him lead the
racers by a head at the end of the course. The world
is wide, and dews of every temperature fall upon its
meadow and pasture lands. Vast regions are fresh and

London to John O' Groat's. 4.15

green all the year round, yielding food for cattle seem-
ingly in the best conditions created for their growth and
perfection. The highest nobility and gentry of this
and other countries are giving to the living statuary of
these animals that science, taste and genius which the
most enthusiastic artists are giving to the still, but
speaking statuary of the canvas. The competition in
this cultivation of animal life is wide and eager, and
spreading fast over Christendom; emperors, kings,
princes, dukes and belted barons are on the lists.
Antipodean agriculturists meet in the great international
concours of cattle, horses, sheep and swine. Never
was royal blood or the inheritance of a crown threaded
through divergent veins to its source with more care
and pride than the lineage of these four-footed " prin-
ces" and "princesses," " dukes" and " duchesses," and
" knights" and " ladies" of the stable and pasture.
No peerage ever kept a more jealous heraldry than the
herd-book of this great quadruped ndblesse. The world,
by consent, has crowned the Shorthorn Durham as the
best blood that ever a horned animal carried in its veins.
Princely connoisseurs and amateurs, and all the dilettanti,
as well as practical agriculturists of Christendom, are
giving more thought to the perfection and perpetua-
tion of this blood than to that of any other name and
breed. Still and this distinction is crowned with

4i 6 A Walk from

double merit by the fact Anthony Cruickshank, draper
of Aberdeen, has worked his way, gradually and noise-
lessly, to the very head and front of the Shorthorn knight-
hood of the world. While pursuing the occupation to
which he was bred with as much assiduity and success
as if it had every thought and activity which a man
should give to a business, he built up, at a considerable
distance from his warehouse, an enterprise of an entirely
different nature, to a magnitude which no other man has
ever equalled. He now owns the largest herd of Short-
horns in the world, breeding and feeding them to the
highest perfection in the cold and naturally unfertile
county of Aberdeen, which no man of less patience
and perseverance would select as the ground on which
to enter the lists against such an array of competitors
in Great Britain and other countries. I regret that my
Notes have already expanded to such a volume as to
preclude a more extended account of his operations in
this great field of usefulness. A few simple facts will
suffice to give the reader an approximate idea of what
he has done in this department.

About the year 1825, young Cruickshank was put
to a Friends' school in Cumberland. . He was a
farmer's son, and seems to have conceived a great
fancy for cattle from childhood. A gentleman resided
not far from the school who was an owner and amateur

London to John O' Groat's. 417

of Shorthorns, and Anthony would frequently spend
his half-holidays with him, inspecting and admiring
his herd and asking him questions about their qualities
and his way of treating them. From this school he
was sent as an apprentice to a trading establishment
in Edinburgh, and at the end of his term set up
business for himself as a draper in Aberdeen. All
through this period he carried with him his first
interest in cattle-culture, but was unable to make a
beginning in it until 1837, when he purchased a single
Shorthorn cow in the county of Durham and soon
afterward two other animals of the same blood. These
constituted the nucleus of his herd at Sittyton. One
by one he added other animals of the same stock,
purchased in different parts of England, Ireland and
Scotland. With these accessions by purchase, and
from natural increase, his herd grew rapidly and
prospered finely, so that he was obliged to add field
to field and farm to farm to produce feed for such a
number of mouths. In a few years he reached his
present maximum which he does not wish to exceed.
That is, his herd now averages annually three hundred
head of this noble and beautiful race of animals, or the
largest number of them owned by any one man in the
world. In 1841 he announced his first sale of young
bulls, and every year since that date has put up at
2 E

4i 8 A Walk from

public auction the male progeny of the herd. These
sales usually take place in the first week of October,
and are attended by from 300 to 500 persons from all
parts of the kingdom. After carefully inspecting the
various lots, they adjourn to a substantial luncheon at
twelve o'clock, and at one p.m. they repair to the
sale ring and the bidding begins in good earnest, and
the salesman's hammer falls quick and often, averaging
about a minute and a half to each lot. Thus the forty
lots of young bulls from six to ten months old are
passed away, averaging from 33 to 44 guineas each.
Besides these, from fifty to sixty young bulls, cows
and heifers are disposed of by private sale during the
season, ranging from 50 to 150 guineas, going to
buyers from all parts of the world.

It is Mr. Cruickshank's well-matured opinion, result-
ing from long experience and observation, that there
is no breed of cattle so easily maintained in good con-
dition as the Shorthorns. His are fed on pasture grass
from the 1st of May to the middle of October, lying-
in the open field night and day. In the winter they
are fed entirely on oat-straw and turnips. Not a handful
of, hay or of meal is given them. The calves are
allowed to suck their dams at pleasure. He is con-
vinced that with this simple system of feeding,
together with the bracing air of Aberdeciisliire, he

London to John O' Groat's. 419

has obtained a tribe of animals of hardy and robust
constitutions, of early maturity, well calculated to
improve the general stock of the country.

It was to me a delight to see this, the greatest
herd of Shorthorns in the world, numbering animals
of apparently the highest perfection to which they
could attain under human treatment. What a court
and coterie of "princes," "dukes," "knights" and
" ladies " those stables contained creatures that would
not have dishonored higher names by wearing them !
I was pleased to find that Eepublics and their less
pretentious titles were not excluded from the goodly
fellowship of this short-horned aristocracy. There was
one grand and noble bull called " President Lincoln,"
not only, I fancy, out of respect to "Honest Old
Abe," but also in reference to the disposition and
capacities of the animal. Truly, if let loose in some of
our New England fields he would prove himself a
tremendous " rail-splitter."

After spending a quiet sabbath with this old friend
and host at his farm-house at Sittyton, I took the
train for Edinburgh and had a week of the liveliest
enjoyment in that city, attending the meetings of the
Social Science Congress. There I saw and heard for
the first time tho venerable Lord Brougham, also men
and women of less reputation, but of equal heart and

420 A Walk from

will to serve their kind and country. I had intended
to make a separate chapter on these meetings and
another on the re-unions of the British Association
at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but the space to which this
volume must be limited precludes any notice of these
most interesting and important gatherings. Stopping
at different points on the way, I reached London
about the middle of October, having occupied just
four months in my northern tour; bringing back a
heartful of sunny memories of what I had seen and
enjoyed.

Robinson and Waitt, Printers, tfa, Dowgate Hill, Cannon Street, London.

A LIST OF BOOKS

PUBLISHING BY

SAMPSON LOW, SON, AND MARSTON.

14, LUDGATE HILL, LONDON.

[April, 1864.
NEW ILLUSTRATED "WORKS.

IAVOURJTE English Poems. Complete Edition.
Comprising a Collection of the most celebrated Poems in
the English Language, with but one or two exceptions
unabridged, from Chaucer to Tennyson. With 300 Illus-
trations by the first Artists. Two vols. royal 8vo. half-
bound, top gilt, Roxburgh style, II. 18s. ; antique calf, SI. 3s.

%* Either Volume sold separately as distinct works. 1. " Early
English Poems, Chaucer to Dyer." 2. " Favourite English Poems,
Thomson to Tennyson." Each handsomely bound in cloth, I/. Is. ; or
morocco extra, II. 15s.

" One of the choicest gift-books of the year. The selections are wisely
and fairly made, whilst more than 300 dr airings by Messrs. Cope, Creswick,
Medgrave, Taylor, Birket Foster, and other artists, feed the eye and eluci-
' date the text. The paper is of a creamy tint, the type good, the binding
solid, and the whole appearance handsome and solid. " Favourite English
Poems " is not a toy book, to be laid for a week on the Christmas table and
then thrown aside with the sparkling trifles of the Christmas tree, but an
honest book, to be admired in the season of pleasant remembrances for its
artistic beauty; and, when the holydays are over, to be placed for frequent
and affectionate consultation, on a favourite shelf." Athenaeum.

A Christmas Carol. 8vo. Illustrated. 12s.

Life Portraits of Shakspeare ; with an Examination of the
Authenticity, and a History of the various Representations of the Poet.
By J. H. Friswell, Member of the National Shakspeare Committee.
Illustrated by Photographs of authentic and received Portraits. Square
8vo. 21s. ; or with Photograph of the Will, 25s.

" Everything that is worth knowing we had almost said that can be
known about the various presentations of the poet's face, is to be found in
this beautiful monograph. . . . The photographs are simply among the
clearest, softest, and most completely free from /line that u-e have ever
seen. The author has made the subject the study of a life, and is equally
qualified to approach it either from its literary or artistic side." Spectator.

Life and Correspondence of Dr. Lyman Beecher, D.D. 2 vols.
post 8vo. With Illustrations. Vol. I. 10s. 6d.

Dockyard Economy and Naval Power. By P. Barry, Author of
" The Dockyards and Shipyards of the Kingdom." With Photographs
of the Great Private Establishments. 8vo. 21s.

The Great Schools of England. By Howard Staunton, Esq.
With numerous Illustrations. 8vo. [In the press.

In the Woods with the Poets. Beautifully illustrated. Demy 8vo.
cloth elegant, bevelled boards, 12s. (uniform with Weir's " Poetry of
Nature ") ; morocco extra, 18s.

Sampson Low and Co.'s

The Poetry of Nature. Selected and Illustrated with Thirty-six
Engravings by Harrison Weir. Small 4to. handsomely bound in cloth,
gilt edges, 12s. ; morocco, II. Is.

The Poets of the Elizabethan Age : a Selection of Songs and
Ballads of the Days of Queen Elizabeth. Choicely illustrated by eminent
Artists. Crown 8vo. Bevelled boards, 7s. 6rf. ; morocco, 12s.

Songs and Sonnets from William Shakespeare ; selected and
arranged by Howard Staunton, Esq. With 30 exquisite Drawings by
John Gilbert. Fcap. 4to. bevelled boards, 7s. 6rf. ; morocco extra, 12s.

A Gentle Life : Essays in Aid of the Formation of Character of
Gentlemen and Gentlewomen. Crown 8vo. Second Edition, 6s.

Mr. Tennyson's May Queen. Illustrated with Thirty-five De-
signs by E. V. B. Small 4to. cloth, bevelled boards, 7s. 6d. ; or in mo-
rocco antique, bound by Hayday, II. Is. Crown 8vo. edition, cloth 5s.;
bevelled boards, 5s. 6d. ; morocco, 10s. 6d.

A New Edition of Choice Editions of Choice Books. Illustrated
by C. W. Cope, R.A., T. Creswick, R.A., Edward Duncan, Birket Foster,
J. C. Horsley, A.R.A., George Hicks, R. Redgrave, R.A., C. Stonehonse,
F. Tayler, George Thomas, H. J. Townshend, E. H. Wehnert, Harrison
Weir, &c. Crown 8vo. cloth, 5s. each ; bevelled boards, 5s. 6d. ; or, in
morocco, gilt edges, 10s. 6rf.

Bloomfield's Farmer's Boy.
Campbell's Pleasures of Hope.
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.
Goldsmith's Deserted Village.
Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield.
Gray's Elegy in a Churchyard.

Keat's Eve of St. Agnes.
Milton's PAllegro.
Shakspeare's Songs and Sonnets.
Tennyson's May Queen.
Warton's Hamlet.
Wordsworth's Pastoral Poems.

" Such works are a glorious beatification for a poet. Such works as
these educate townsmen, who, surrounded by dead and artificial things, as
country people are by life and nature, scarcely learn to look at nature till
taught by these concentrated specimens of her beauty." Athenaeum.

Our Little Ones in Heaven : Thoughts in Prose and Verse, se-
lected from the Writings of favourite Authors; with an Introduction by
the late Rev. Henry Robbins, M.A., beautifully printed by Clay, with
Frontispiece after Sir Joshua Reynolds. Fcap. 8vo. cloth extra, 'As. 6d.

LITERATURE, WORKS OF REFERENCE, AND
EDUCATION.

5?HE English Catalogue of Books: giving the date of
publication of every book published from 1835 to 1863, in addi-
tion to the title, size, price, and publisher, in one alphabet.
An entirely new work, combining the Copyrights of the " Lon-
don Catalogue " and the " British Catalogue." One thick
volume of 900 pages. [In the press.

A Walk from London to the Land's End. With Notes by the
Way. With Photographs. By Elihu Burritt. Post 8vo. 12s.

Man and Nature ; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human
Action. By George P. Marsh, Author of " Lectures on the English Lan-
guage," &c. 8vo. [Shortly.

Her Majesty's Mails : being an Historical, Descriptive, and
Suggestive Account of the British Post Office. By an Officer q the De-
partment. Post 8vo. 7s 6rf.

List of Publications.

The Origin and History of the English Language, and of the
early literature it embodies. By the Hon. George P. Marsh, U. S.
Minister at Turin, Author of " Lectures on the English Language."
8vo. cloth extra, 16s.

%* The copyright of this important work is secured both in Great
Britain and the Continent.

" Written with a grace and mastery of the language which show the
Author to be not unworthy of ranking himself among English Classics ; it
deserves a place on the shelves of every educated Englishman." Noncon-
formist, Oct. 8, 1862.

" Mr. Marsh shows not only a real love of his subject, but a thorough
acquaintance with it. In the present series of lectures he carries on the
history of the English language, and of English literature, from its very
beginning down to the reign of Elizabeth." Saturday Review, Oct. 18.

Lectures on the English Language; forming the Introductory
Series to the foregoing Work. By the same Author. 8vo. Cloth, 16s.
This is the only author's edition.

" We give it a hearty welcome, as calculated to excite an interest in
the study of English, and to render valuable assistance in its pursuit."
Atheuxum.

" We can only say that if the complete course be as remarkable

for learning, diligence, discrimination, and good sense as the preparatory,
we shall have to thank Mr. Marsh for the most perfect philological treatise
upon tlie English language which we can hope to see in our generation."

Critic

English and Scotch Ballads, &c. An extensive Collection. De-
signed as a Complement to the Works of the British Poets, and embracing
nearly all the Ancient and Traditionary Ballads both of England and
Scotland, in all the important varieties of form in which they are extant,
with Notices of the kindred Ballads of other Nations. Edited by F. J.
Child. A new Edition, revised by the Editor. 8 vols. fcap. cloth, 3s. Gd.
each, uniform with Bonn's Libraries.

Poets and Poetry of Europe; by Henry W. Longfellow. 8vo. 21s.

-.. Being the first and
ithfully reprinted. 8vo.
cloth, 7s. 6d. ; half morocco, 10s. 6rf.

The English Catalogue of Books published during 1863 ; with
Title, Size, Price, and Publisher's Name. 8vo. 3s. 6cf.

Index to the Subjects of Books published in the United Kingdom

during the last Twenty Years 1837-1857. One vol. royal 8vo. Mo-
rocco, I/. 6s.

Although nominally the Index to the British Catalogue, it is equally
so to all general Catalogues of Books during the same period, containing
as many as 74,000 references, under subjects, so as to ensure immediate
reference to Uie books on the subject required, each giving title, price,
publisher, and date.

Two valuable Appendices are also given A, containing full lists of all
Libraries, Collections, Series, and Miscellanies and B, a List of Literary
Societies, Printing Societies, and their Issues.

The American Catalogue, or English Guide to American Lite-
rature; giving the full title of original Works published in the United
States of America since the year 1800, with especial reference to the
works of interest to Great Britain, with the size, price, place, date
of publication, and London prices. With comprehensive Index. 8vo.
2s. 6d. Also Supplement, 1837-60. 8vo. 6d.

Shakespeare's Tragedy of Hamlet: 1603-1604. Being: the first and
second Editions of Shakespeare's great drama, fait!

Sampson Low and (70. 's

The Publishers' Circular, and General Record of British and

Foreign Literature ; giving a transcript of the title-page of every work
published in Great Britain, and every work of interest published abroad,
with lists of all the publishing houses.

Published regularly on the 1st and 15th of every Month, and forwarded
post free to all parts of the world on payment of 8s. per annum.
V* Established by the Publishers of London in 1837.

The Handy-book of Patent and Copyright Law, English and
Foreign, for the use of Inventors, Patentees, Authors, and Publishers.
Comprising the Law and Practice of Patents, the Law of Copyright of
Designs, the Law of Literary Copyright. By James Fraser, Esq. Post
8vo. cloth, 4s. 6rf. (Uniform with Lord St. Leonard's " Handy-book of
Property Law.")

A Concise Summary of the Law of English and French Copyright
Law and International Law, by Peter Burke. 12mo. 5s.

Dr. Worcester's New and Greatly Enlarged Dictionary of the
English Language. Adapted for Library or College Reference, compris-
ing 40,000 Words more than Johnson's Dictionary, and 250 pages more
than the Quarto Edition of Webster's Dictionary. In one Volume, royal
4to. cloth, 1,834 pp. price 31s. 6d. The Cheapest Book ever published.
" The volumes before us show a vast amount of diligence ; but with
Webster it is diligence in combination with fancifulness, with Worcester in
combination with good sense and judgment. Worcester's is the soberer and
safer book, and may be pronounced the best existing English Lexicon."

Athenceum, July 13, 1861.

The Ladies' Reader : with some Plain and Simple Rules and In-
structions for a good style of Reading aloud, and a variety of Selections
for Exercise. By George VandenhofF, M.A., Author of " The Art of Elo-
cution." Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, 5s.

The Clerical Assistant : an Elocutionary Guide to the Reading
of the Scriptures and the Liturgy, several passages being marked for
Pitch and Emphasis : with some Observations on Clerical Bronchitus.
By George Vandenhoff, M.A. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, 3s. 6d.

The Art of Elocution as an essential part of Rhetoric, with in-
structions in Gesture, and an Appendix of Oratorical, Poetical and Dra-
matic extracts. By George Vandenhoff, M'A. Third Edition. 5s.

Latin-English Lexicon, by Dr. Andrews. 7th Edition. 8vo. 18s.

The superiority of this justly-famed Lexicon is retained over all others
by the fulness of its quotations, the including in the vocabulary proper
names, the distinguishing whether the derivative is classical or otherwise,
the exactness of the references to the original authors, and in the price.

" Every page bears the impress of industry and care." Athenaeum.

" The best Latin Dictionary, whether for the scholar or advanced stu-
dent." Spectator.

" We have no hesitation in saying it is the best Dictionary of the Latin
language that has appeared." Literary Gazette.

" We never saiv such a book published at such a price." Examiner.

The Laws of Life, with especial reference to the Education of
Girls. By Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D. New Edition, revised by the
Author, 12mo. cloth, 3s. 6rf.

The Farm and Fruit of Old. From Virgil. By a Market Gar-
dener. Is.

Usque ad Coelum ; or, the Dwellings of the People. By Thomas
Hare, Esq., Barrister-at-Law. Fcap. Is.

List of Publications.

Work and Play. By Horace Bushnell, D.D., Author of " Na-
ture and Supernatural." Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6rf.

Eyes and Ears. By Henry Ward Beecher, D.D., Author of
" Life Thoughts," &c. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.

The Charities of London : an Account of the Origin, Operations,
and general Condition of the Charitable, Educational, and Religious
Institutions of London. With copious Index. Also an Alphabetical Ap-
pendix corrected to May 1863. Fcap. cloth, 5s.

** The latter also as a separate publication, forms " Low's Shilling
Guide to the Charities of London."

Signals of Distress, in Refuges and Houses of Charity ; in Indus-
trial Schools and Reformatories ; at Invalids' Dinner Tables, and in the
Homes of the Little Sisters of the Poor, &c. &c. ; among the Fallen, the
Vicious, and the Criminal ; where Missionaries travel, and where Good
Samaritans clothe the naked. By Blanchard Jerrold, Author of " The
Life of Douglas Jerrold," &c. Crown 8vo. 7s. Gd.

The Children of Lutetia. By Blanchard Jerrold. 2 vols. post
8vo. cloth, 16s. [Immediately.

Prince Albert's Golden Precepts. Second Edition, with Photo-
graph. A Memorial of the Prince Consort ; comprising Maxims and
Extracts from Addresses of His late Royal Highness. Many now for
the first time collected and carefully arranged. With an Index. Royal
16mo. beautifully printed on toned paper, cloth, gilt edges, 2s. 6d.

NEW BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE.

;TANTON GRANGE; or, Life at a Private Tutor's.
By the Rev. C. J. Atkinson, Author of " British Birds' Eggs,"
" Play Hours," &c. With Illustrations. Feap. 8vo. 5s.

The Black Panther; or, a Boy's Adventures among
the Red Skins. By Sir Lascelles Wraxall, Bart. With Illustrations.
Fcap. 8vo. 5s.

The Story of Mr. Wind and Madam Rain. Translated from the
French of Paul de Musset, by permission of the Author. By Emily
Makepeace. With 30 Illustrations on Wood, drawn by Charles Bennett.
Small 8vo. 5s.

Little Blue Hood : a Story for Little People. By Thomas Miller.

Fcap. 8vo. cloth, 2s. 6d. ; fancy boards, 2s. With Illustration.

The Boyhood of Martin Luther. By Henry Mayhew, Author
of" The Peasant Boy Philosopher." With eight Illustrations by Absalom.
Small 8vo. cloth, 6s.

Life Amongst the North and South American Indians ; a Book for
Boys. By George Catlin, Author of " Notes of Travel Amongst the North
American Indians," &c. With Illustrations. Small post 8vo. cloth, 6s.

" An admirable book, full of useful information, icrapt up in stories
peculiarly adapted to rouse the imagination and stimulate the curiosity of
boys and girls. To compare a book with ' Robinson Crusoe,' and to say that
it sustains such, comparison is to give it high praise indeed." Athenceum.

The Story of Peter Parley's Own Life. From the Narrative of
the late Samu.el Goodrich, Esq. (Peter Parley). Edited by his friend
and admirer, Frank Freeman. With six Illustrations by W. Thomas.
Fcap. 8vo. cloth, os.

6 Sampson Low and <7o.'s

Paul Duncan's Little by Little ; a Tale for Boys. Edited by
Frank Freeman. With an Illustration by Charles Keene. Fcap. 8vo.
cloth 2s. ; gilt edges, 2s. d.

Uniform Volumes, with Frontispiece, same price.
Boy Missionary; a Tale for Young People. By Mrs. J. M. Parker.
Difficulties Overcome. By Miss Brightwell.

The Babes in the. Basket : a Tale in the West Indian Insurrection.
Jack Buntline ; the Life of a Sailor Boy. By W. H. G. Kingston.

The Boy's Own Book of Boats. By W. H. G. Kingston. Illus-
trations by E. Weedon, engraved by W. J. Linton. Fcap. 8vo. cloth, 5s.
" This well-written, well-wrought book." Athenseum.
" This is something better than a play-book ; and it would be difficult to
find a more compendious and intelligible manual about all that relates to
the variety and rig of vessels and nautical implements and gear." Satur-
day Review.

How to Make Miniature Pumps and a Fire-Engine : a Book for
Boys. With Seven Illustrations. Fcap. 8vo. Is.

Ernest Bracebridge : or, Schoolboy Days, by W. H. G. Kingston,

Author of " Peter the Whaler," &c. Illustrated with Sixteen Engrav-
ings, printed in Tints by Edmund Evans. Fcap. 8vo. 5s.

The Voyage of the " Constance : " a Tale of the Arctic Seas.
With an Appendix, comprising the Story of " The Fox." By Mary Gil-
lies. Illustrated with Eight Engravings on Wood, from Drawings by
Charles Keene. Fcap. 8vo. cloth, 5s.

Stories of the Woods ; or, the Adventures of Leather-Stocking :
A Book for Boys, compiled from Cooper's Series of " Leather-Stocking
Tales." Fcap. cloth, Illustrated, 5s.
" I have to own that I think the heroes of another writer, viz. ' Leather-

Stories of the Sea ; Stirring Adventures selected from the Naval
Tales of J. Fenimore Cooper. Illustrated. 12mo. cloth, 5s.

The Book of Blockheads; How and what they shot, got; said,
had; How they did, and what they did not. By Charles Bennett,
Author of " Little Breeches," &c. With 28 Illustrations by the Author.
4to cloth., 5s.; coloured, 7s. 6d.

The Stories that Little Breeches Told ; and the Pictures that
Charles Bennett drew for them. Dedicated by the latter to his Children.
With upwards of 100 Etchings on copper. ito. cloth, 5s. ; or the plates
coloured, 7s. 6d.

The Children's Picture Book of the Sagacity of Animals. With
numerous Illustrations by Harrison Weir. Super-royal 16mo. cloth. 5s. ;
coloured, 7s. 6d.

" A better reading-book for the young we have not seen for many a
day." Athenaeum.

The Children's Picture Book of Fables. Written expressly for
Children, and Illustrated with Fifty large Engravings, from Drawings
by Harrison Weir. Square, cloth extra, 5s. ; or coloured, 7s. <od.

The Children's Treasury of Pleasure Books. With 140 Illustra-
tions, from Drawings by John Absolon, Edward Wehnert, and Harrison
Weir. Plain, os. ; coloured, 7s. 6rf.

List of Publications.

Snow Flakes, and what they told the Children. By the Author
of " Little Bird Bed and Little Bird Blue." Illustrated by H. K. Browne,
and beautifully printed in colours, uniform with "Child's Play" and
" Little Bird." Square 16mo. bevelled boards extra, 5s.

Child's Play. Illustrated with Sixteen Coloured Drawings by
E. V. B., printed in fac-simile by W. Dickes* process, and ornamented
with Initial Letters. Imp. 16mo. cloth extra, bevelled cloth, 5s. The
Original Edition of this work was published at One Guinea.

Little Bird Red and Little Bird Blue : a Song of the Woods
told for Little Ones at Home. With Coloured Illustrations and Borders
by T. B. Muequoid, Esq. Beautifully printed, with coloured Illustrations
and borders, bevelled boards, 5s.

" One of the most beautiful books for children we have ever seen. It is
irresistible." Morning Herald.

The Nursery Playmate. With 200 Illustrations, beautifully
printed on thick paper. 4to. Illustrated boards, 5s. ; or the whole, well
coloured, 9s.

More Fun for our Young Friends. By Mary Gillies, Author
of " Great Fun." With 24 large page Illustrations. Large 4to, 5s.;
coloured, 7s. 6d.

Fancy Tales, from the German. By J. S. Laurie, H. M. In-
spector of Schools, and Otto Striedinger. Illustrated by H. Sandercock.
Super-royal Itfino. cloth, 3s. &d. ; extra cloth, bevelled boards, 4s.

Great Fun for Little Friends. With 28 Illustrations. Small 4to.
cloth, 5s. ; coloured, 7s. 6d.

Mark Willson's First Reader. By the Author of " The Picture
Alphabet " and " The Picture Primer." With 120 Pictures. Is.
Also by the same Author,

The Picture Alphabet ; or Child's First Letter Book. With new
and original Designs. 6d.

The Picture Primer. Qd.

" We cordially recommend these little books as amongst the very best of
their kind, and should like to see them in every nursery in the kingdom."
Dial, Jan. 31, 1862.

" These two little books are among the best we ever saw of their kind.
They are clearly and beautifully printed, and the illustrative designs are
really like the things they represent, and are well chosen to suit an infant's
comprehension, and to awaken its curiosity." Globe, Jan. 30, 1862.

The Swiss Family Robinson ; or, the Adventures of a Father and
Mother and Four Sons on a Desert Island. With Explanatory Notes and
Illustrations. First and Second Series. New Edition, complete in one
volume, 3s. 6rf.

The Child's Book of Nature, by W. Hooker, M.D. With 180
Illustrations. Sq. 12mo. cloth, bevelled. 8s. 8d.

Actea ; a First Lesson in Natural History. By Mrs. Agassiz.
Edited by Professor Agassiz. Illustrated. Feap. 8vo. 3s. M.

Geography for my Children. By Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Author of " Uncle Tom's Cabin," &c. Arranged and Edited by an Eng-
lish Lady, under the Direction of the Authoress. With upwards of Fifty
Illustrations. Cloth extra, 4s. Qd.

Sampson Low and Co.'s

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY.

HISTORY of West Point, the United States Military
Academy, and its Military Importance. By Capt. E. C.
Boyiiton, A.M. With Plan* and Illustrations. 8vo. 21s.

The Twelve Great Battles of England, from Hastings
to Waterloo. With Plans, feap. 8vo. cloth extra, 3s. Gd.

Plutarch's Lives. An entirely new Library Edition, carefully
revised and corrected, with some Original Translations by the Editor.
Edited by A. H. Clough, Esq. sometime Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford,
and late Professor of English Language and Literature at University
College. 5 vols. 8vo. cloth. 21. 10s.

" Mr. Clough' s work is worthy of all praise, and we hope that it will
tend to revive the study of Plutarch." Times.

The Federalist : ^Collection of Essays written in favour of the
New Constitution as agreed upon by the Federal Convention, Sept. 17,
1787. Reprinted from the Original Text : with an Historical Introduc-
tion and Notes by Henry B. Dawson. In 2 vols. Vol. I. with Portrait
of Alexander Hamilton. 8vo. pp. 757, cloth, 18s.

Eighty Years' Progress of British North America : showing the
Wonderful Development of its Natural Resources by the unbounded
Energy and Enterprise of its Inhabitants ; giving in an historical form
the vast Improvements made in Agriculture, Commerce, and Trade;
Modes of Travel and Transportation ; Mining and Educational Interests,
&c. Illustrated with Steel Engravings. 8vo. pp. 776, cloth, 21s.

George Washington's Life, by Washington Irving. Library
Illustrated Edition. 5 vols. Imp. 8vo. 4i. 4s. Library Edit. Royal 8vo.
12s. each

Life of John Adams, 2nd President of the United States, by C.
F. Adams. 8vo. 14s. Life and Works complete, 10 vols. 14s. each.

TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE.

Southern Friends. By Edmund Kirke. One Vol.
Fcap. 8vo., cloth, 2s. Gd. Cheap Edition. Fcap., boards, Is. Gd.
A startling narrative of personal experience and adventure.

Arabian Days and Nights; or, Rays from the East:
a Narrative. By Marguerite A. Power. 1 vol. Post 8vo. 10s. Gd.

" Miss Power's book is thoroughly interesting and does much credit to
her talent for observation and description." London Review.

Wild Scenes in South America ; or, Life in the Llanos of Vene-
zuela. By Don Ramon Paez. Numerous Illustrations. Post 8vo. cloth,
10s. Gd.

After Icebergs with a Painter ; a Summer's Voyage to Labrador.
By the Rev. Louis L. Noble. Post 8vo. with coloured plates, cloth, 10s. 6d.
" This is a beautiful and true book, excellently suited for family reading,
and its least recommendation is not that without cant or impertinence it
turns every thought and emotion excited by the wonders it describes to the
honour of the Creator." Daily News.

From Calcutta to Pekin. A Personal Narrative of the Late War.
By a Staff Officer. The only Authentic Narrative of the late War with
China. In popular form, price 2s. Gd.

Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army of America. By an Im-
pressed New Yorker. A Narrative of Facts. The personal adventures
described, while stranger than fiction, are only the simple truth. Fcap.
8vo. cloth, with an Illustration, 3s. 6d.

List of Publications.

The Prairie and Overland Traveller ; a Companion for Emigrants, '
Traders, Travellers, Hunters, and Soldiers, traversing gfreat Plains and
Prairies. By Capt. R. B. Marcey. Illustrated. Fcap. 8vo. cloth, 2$. &d.
" This is a real, carefully executed collection of information and expe-
riences, the which every one who takes up will hardly lay down until he

has read from A to Z It is not only valuable to the special traveller,

but fascinating to the general reader The author is as full of matter

as any old sailor who has sailedibur times round the world." Atheneeum.

Ten Years of Preacher Life ; Chapters from an Autobiography.
By William Henry Milburn, Author of " Rifle, Axe, and Saddle-Bags."
With Introduction by the Rev. William Arthur, Author of " The Success-
ful Merchant," &c. Crown 8vo. cloth. 4s. 6d.

The States of Central America, by E. G. Squier. Cloth. 18s.

Home and Abroad (Second Series). A Sketch-book of Life, Men,
and Travel, by Bayard Taylor. With Illustrations, post 8vo. cloth,
8s. 6d.

Northern Travel. Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden,
Lapland, and Norway, by Bayard Taylor. 1 vol. post 8vo., cloth, 8s. 6c/.

Also by the same Author, each complete in 1 vol., icith Illustrations.
Central Africa ; Egypttnd the White Nile. Is. 6d.
India, China, and Japan. Is. 6d.
Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain. 7s. 6rf.
Travels in Greece and Russia. With an Excursion to Crete, 7s. 6rf.

INDIA, AMERICA, AND THE COLONIES.

HE Colony of Victoria : its History, Commerce, and
Gold Mining : its Social and Political Institutions, down to the
End of 1863. With Remarks, Incidental and Comparative,
upon the other Australian Colonies. By William Westgarth,
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